Watch Out – there’s a Tick in the Woods
After watching my wife go through her third bout of Lyme Disease in 10 years, I have a natural dislike and distrust of ticks. Not that anyone actually likes the little blood-sucking creatures (well, other than that odd entomologist) but my disdain for them has grown. The ticks responsible for this devestating and completely under-researched disease are deer ticks (sp. Ixodes), who pass along the Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria in their bites, are quite common in our area – in fact, the majority of the cases of Lyme Disease in the U.S. are in the northeast, although the rest of the country is catching up quickly. And this summer is shaping to be one of the worst that I can remember.
As my wife and I enjoy birding and hiking, particularly with our two dogs, we have an extra wariness about ticks – and lately with good reason. Again, aside from our natural paranoia about us getting Lyme, we’ve also worried about the dogs getting it: a) because it’s harder to tell if they’ve been bitten; b) it’s harder to know if they have the disease and c) there’s no real effective treatment for dogs (heck, the human treatment is mediocre at best). So, we’re doing our best to prevent as much as we can. In this case that means a flea/mosquito/tick preventative, Frontline®, applied religiously every 3 months.
Unfortunately, while Frontline advertises protection against ticks, there’s one little caveat – it won’t actually prevent ticks from getting on your dog or even biting them. What it offers is that it will – in most cases – kill ticks within 24 hours, a time that should prevent any transmission of Lyme Disease. That’s a shallow promise – but better than nothing.
THAT BEING SAID, it’s not deer ticks that we’re running into a problem with – it’s your plain, run-of-the-mill, generic American Dog or wood tick (Dermacentor variabilis). If you haven’t spent any time outside yet this year, be warned – this is going to be a VERY bad year for ticks. Yesterday, we went for a 2-hour hike mostly on trails (the only side excursions were the dogs running into the grass along the edge of the trail). By last night, we’d picked 7 ticks off of one dog and 5 off of the other. And it’s been like this for the past two weeks. Not a night has gone by without pulling at least one tick off of each of them. And Shari and I haven’t been immune, either. Every excursion has resulted in at least one tick during the hike or shortly after.
Luckily for the dogs, the Frontline seems to be working – all of the living ticks we’ve pulled off either haven’t bitten them yet or have only barely gotten there. Other than that, they have all been dead – a good sign that the Frontline is working, at least in killing the ticks. Who knows if it’s preventing any disease, but at least I’m confident I’m not going to find any engorged ticks that would make me even more worried.
Still, if you are out in the northeast (PA, DE, NJ, MD), make sure you take precautions. Our winter was mild, which was nice, but the ticks have taken advantage and they are EVERYWHERE right now.
