I've lived in an area that has dog ticks (not the Lyme carrying ones). I've pulled dozens of ticks off myself. I've never once had one attach, always caught them in time.
I got into archery during covid and would haul a target out onto some grasslands and shoot. My buddy and I would pull half a dozen ticks off ourselves at the end. I'd find ticks half dead on my car dash the next day.
We bought "tick pants". Pants coated in some chemical that does something like this. Tuck them into our boots.
No more ticks.
Clothes coated in this drug seems like a good alternative to actually consuming the drug in my opinion.
Also I've been trying to spot a tick in the wild before it grabs me and have never done it. I want to see a "questing" tick, ie one that is holding on to the edge of a blade of grass with its arms out trying to grab something.
When you know what to look for, a questing tick is not too hard to spot.
If you are in an area that you suspect might have a lot of ticks. Look at the tips of any grass stems for a little brown/black spot. They climb as high as they can and then kinda "stand up" and put their "arms" up and out and wait for something to touch them. Then it's off to the races to climb as high as they can... on you. They stop once they hit an obstacle they can't easily get around and dig in.
I spray my shoes with permethrin. That seems to almost totally eliminate climbers as I'm not walking through tall grass. You know they've gotten a deadly dose when they start walking in circles. I don't feel bad for them. My doctor told me that 85% of ticks in my area are positive for Lyme.
trying to spot ticks in heavy brush as you are walking seems like a inefficient approach. They take a while to attach so if you do a thorough review after your activity you should be good. It's also a lot easier to strip down to your birthday suit in the privacy of your own home.
Stripping down has massive 'corner' cases. If you are alone, good luck find one on your back, between ass cheeks and few other places. Also if you do full day activity (or god forbid multiday out in the wild), not so good.
Once they reach your hair (unless you shave clean), even good luck may not be enough, very hard to spot and almost impossible alone
Yes of course but not good enough, imagine darker not ultra short hair, how do you spot one on the back of your greasy hair.
I live in places where lyme is barely 5% incidence, and even that not everywhere. If it would be like 80% like some mention, doing week-long hikes alone would be outright suicidal. Better chances for retirement in base jumping.
You can feel your head for them. Even if you have one attach, Lyme is really only concern after 72 hours of attachment (other things can be an immediate concern). You should be quite itchy and notice it before then. A single dose of antibiotics is a highly effective post exposure prophylactic. Lyme is a concern, but not as bad as many in the media make it out to be.
Lyme is not the worst thing from ticks. Tick-borne encephalitis is much worse and can effectively leave a person disabled. There's just no treatment for it.
That's why I said there are other concerns that can be more immediate. The point was that lyme is not an inevitably or death sentence. Encephalitis is one of the more rare ones.
“permethrin“ is the stuff that kills ticks. My brother works outside and got Lyme disease. It was awful so his crew wear permethrin soaked clothing. I think they buy it pre treated.
I found two deer ticks (one attached) last fall. I always wear long pants and they’d just climb up till past my waist. They’re quite small.
They gave me one dose of antibiotics as a preventative. I worry about our dog. She got the vaccine and has some medicine that kills then, but I still found three on her.
I once rented a cabin on Cape Cod, right next to the beach. The path to the beach had big clumps of grass growing at the sides, with overhanging blades of grass. The first day we realized that every single clump of grass had numerous questing ticks on them. You could see them clearly, all just waiting to latch on to you as you walked by. Honestly, it was kind of terrifying.
Also I've been trying to spot a tick in the wild before it grabs me and have never done it. I want to see a "questing" tick, ie one that is holding on to the edge of a blade of grass with its arms out trying to grab something.
Interestingly, a "questing" tick has been found to be able to cross air gaps by leveraging static electricity:
“We have now discovered that ticks can be lifted across air gaps several times larger than themselves by the static electricity that other animals naturally build up. This makes it easier for them to find and attach onto animals that they want to latch onto and feed from.
Kills ticks but also kills cats, so be careful. I have heard that once it is dry, it isn't a threat to your little furry friend, but I still won't risk it.
Seems there are a couple of chemicals that act as anti-tick. We're using Seresto collars for our two dogs (no ticks in a decade of usage), which seems to be using Imidacloprid (anti-fleas) and Flumethrin (anti-ticks).
So at least there seems to be two ingredients, there are probably more.
A long time ago when I worked on a seismic crew we found ourselves cutting lines through the brush in a river bottom. Millions of ticks would swarm up your pant legs in a red-brown cloud looking for any opening to your skin. It was not unusual to see someone strip down in the field and burn the ticks off of their clothes. I carried a large knife and used the blade to peel them off my pants by the hundreds. It was crazy how thick they were. They seemed to be hanging on every pecan leaf and on the grass under the trees.
We began treating our boots with diesel to try to repel them. That worked to a point. It didn't take long to reveal the shortcoming in that method - diesel fuel soaks through the leather and easily enters the skin. It ruins the boot leather and burns your skin so that wearing anything on your feet is very painful so we abandoned that method.
After looking at options we decided to use cattle ear tags because each cow only uses one and it keeps them tick-free. After reading all the warnings about safe handling - wear gloves, avoid skin contact, potential reproductive harm, cancer risk, etc. - we decided that it made no difference. We realized that this had to be absorbed through the cow's bloodstream from the puncture on the ear and since every cow we had ever seen had an ear tag, this meant that this chemical was present in every steak or burger we had ever eaten so wearing one long enough to complete the part of the survey with the tick problem wasn't going to increase our risk of any adverse effects.
We bought a pack of tags and each hung one on a boot and never had another tick.
I don't have any known health issues to report here 40 years later. Totally anecdotal information from what is likely to have been a low-dose, short duration exposure event.
Well, there's a difference between something entering your body through your digestive tract, and something entering your body directly through the bloodstream. Additionally, different substances have different bioaccumulation characteristics - some substances may accumulate in only in specific tissues (fat, muscle, etc.), a combination of tissues, or none. How an insecticide bioaccumulates in cattle would affect their suitability for beef.
You don't usually get bitten by mosquitoes on your neck though, how would this help with the bites you DO get all over your legs and arms? Or are you suggesting something so potent it absorbs into your bloodstream and then prevents bug bites? no thanks.
> Or are you suggesting something so potent it absorbs into your bloodstream and then prevents bug bites
That’s what the medicated pet collars do.
Part of the advantage of collar-absorption is that you can use a molecule that readily breaks down/inactivates in digestion. And avoid sharp peaks in blood levels.
> how would this help with the bites you DO get all over your legs and arms?
Not sure how true it is, but the marketing for the collars we use claims that eventually the chemicals spreads to protect the full body, even if the collar is just around the neck.
In Germany there is a spray based on eucalyptus oil and it works very well. it is marketed as “sensitive”. we have a dog that licks stuff and wanted to avoid the use of the acaricides
AFAIK there has only been one documented case of it killing a kitten and it drank the liquid form, unknown quantity. Baby animals do not yet have fully formed livers to metabolize the sodium channel blocker. Insects on the other hand do not have a liver. They use body fat to detoxify but it isn't fast enough or volumetric enough to handle the sodium channel blocker in large amounts relative to their size.
People put dog tick/flea stuff on cats all the time by accident containing it (I've personally seen it twice now), it usually doesn't kill them but it's absolutely horrible to witness, cats will get seizures and treatment is only supportive, either they live or they don't. Both the cases I saw were brought to the vet and the cats were messed up pretty bad for a few days.
I could imagine if a cat was being covered in it often enough and they lick it up their glutathione may be depleted then their liver won't keep up. I will have to dig into the stats iskander provided to see pre-existing condition the cats were at. i.e. elderly, kittens, sickly Skimming over it I am not seeing stats on age or liver health.
I use permethrin around my yard as well as have some clothing I’ve treated myself. I also use flea and tick treatment on my two dogs which is primarily permethrin.
I have two cats and we haven’t had any issues that I could see.
I make 100% sure they can never be exposed to it when it’s wet, but they’ve been around me in treated clothing, escaped the house and walked through treated (dry) grass, been around dogs that have been treated with it, etc.
Given the number of people that have cats and dogs living together who are treating their dogs with it monthly, it seems relatively safe if used properly and cautiously.
I find this surprising, are you sure it's not based on the concentration of the permethrin? Here in the US, I was able to buy a clothing spray of 0.5% permethrin from Home Depot. I'm also reasonably certain that at least some lice shampoos I've seen at my nearby CVS use permethrin, although I checked the one I bought and it doesn't have it.
Can confirm above comment. Only thing close we can buy is permethrin impregnated clothes for mosquitoes. No permethrin anything otherwise. I have some, but only because I had my sister ship it from the states. Blows my mind that you can buy up to 36% permethrin by the jug down there
It takes time for a tick to transmit lyme disease, but you can also take a single dose of doxycycline as post-exposure prophylaxis if you think it was attached for a while and ask a doctor
They recommend that dose if it’s been attached more the 36 hours and it’s less than 72 hours since removed. I fell into this slot last fall and got a single dose of doxycycline.
Odd how the sibling comment got downvoted into oblivion for this, but you're right - prophylaxis is an option here, and last I checked it was the recommended course of action if you develop the bullseye ring. Note that the tests have high false negative rates, so still might be sensible if you have a negative test.
Of course, these antibiotics are not without risk too.
Some points correcting what's been posted here and above. A single dose of Doxycycline is not an effective prophylactic. It failed me and other people I know (after my doctor and I read over the CDC guideline that was misinformation). The original study supporting it was poor regarding how it was established as effective (required the bullseye rash). The bullseye rash does not appear for everyone. Depending on the attach point/strength, ticks pass along bacteria and/or viruses in minutes. Testing the tick and monitoring yourself for symptoms is always a good practice. I prefer clothing & topical solutions vs ingested chemicals.
It would be nice to see support for natural consumption of ticks by fowl (chickens, turkeys, quail, etc), marsupial, etc.
What I read was that the bullseye was considered sufficient evidence even without a positive test to administer antibiotics. I don't know the recommended dose, perhaps a single dose is not enough.
You can take a prophylactic dose of doxycycline for 1-2 days I believe. If you have a lot of ticks in your area a general physician should be familiar with that protocol.
Put it in the freezer as you wait the bullseye game. If you do think you have Lyme's disease then bring the tick with you to the doctor, so that they confirm it.
Works well until you end up with temperatures too hot to wear pants. Or you exercise someplace with ticks and get too sweaty for pants.
Hell, I live as far north as you can go in New England, and I've found ticks on my feet after grilling dinner in my backyard. At some point I just do not care to don my anti-tick hazmat suit every time I do anything outside.
I agree I'd be more happy to use permethrin than ingest something that gets into my blood.
I find a ton of ticks around where I live and have experienced a questing tick by pulling them off of my dog before they attach and then carrying them on something. Sure you're not spotting them naturally but they will quest when given the freedom to do so. If you don't kill them immediately but put them on a leaf or something they will crawl to an end of it and start! If you're just interested in seeing how it looks
We usually use anti-tick spray on our skin and clothes when hiking in tick-infested areas, and then check for ticks in the evening. Also important to long pants and shirts if possible.
I can relate to this. My poor dog god bless her soul would collect ticks like a bandit in our backyard (not the Lyme ones). I enjoyed removing the little devils off my beloved dog and clear her suffering (and, killing ticks, which is surprisingly hard). I also gave her regular antitick soap baths, but it was not super effective.
Not one bit or attached to any member of our family. And, we had plenty of kids in the low teens around the house. In fact, it was so "OK" to see ticks, that none of the adults made a fuss about them - so we grew up never being paranoid about them - in contrast to most of my east coast friends with kids
I have a hard time understanding how a tick bites a fully grown adult in summer weather. Of course if you are wrapped in massive layers of clothing and you can't see it coming at you, its something different.
Protip: If you take your city dog abroad -particularly a tropical area outside of the country- make sure your dog is very well tick-protected. East/West coast dogs can't handle foreign tick diseases. They don't have built-in inmunities. It only takes 1 tick from a farm/field you visited to give a deadly disease to your best friend.
Almost all coated clothes use permethrin or a similar pyrethroid. It's fairly effective but I often have issues with ticks coming off my dog much later and getting on me. I look forward to this (or a lyme vaccine) making it to market - the ticks are already pretty bad this year in the midwest.
Watch for long grass along deer trails. During a particularly bad tick year (Wisconsin) I could walk along the deer trail by our swamp and just count the ticks hanging out on the ends of the green swamp grass. I did not spend much time outside that spring.
Are there already ticks? I haven't seen them yet in Illinois (though my last hike was a week and a half ago) and it's been below freezing the last few days
Between my wife, dog, and I we've gotten about a dozen in the last three weeks (we are frequent visitors of forests/fields around here). One of them was in February which I've never seen before. Apparently it takes several days of 10 degree weather to kill them off so I doubt it will slow down much from the last couple days of cold.
Unfortunately one of them was a deer tick that dug into my armpit, so now I'm playing the "wait and see if it's Lyme" game :(
When I was a kid, my mother would lightly apply sevin dust on the lower part of my jeans before I spent a lot of time outside. Seemed to work really well at reducing the incidence of flea/tick bites and the stuff washes off quite readily.
I didn't know what Sevin dust is. It's the pesticide that the plant in the Bhopal disaster was making (MIC, precursor to carbaryl). Today's Sevin doesn't have the same chemicals in it that it used to though
I don't know if the ticks would consume the drug on clothing. It is meant to be consumed in a blood meal. That said, it is largely well tolerated in dogs and cats.
I live in rural area of the Ozarks where there are a lot of ticks. Treating shoes and clothes with permethrin is the most effective way to keep them off you.
And doing "tick checks" when you come inside your home is a habit here. Getting them off you fast is the best way to keep from getting lyme disease.
And either burning off or grinding up and piling up all the leaves to make compost this time of year is the best way to get them out of your yard.
I learned this the hard way. Here's a video of how bad they can get here and one of my first attempts at trying to get rid of them. It didn't really work very well:
I have never seen anything like that up here in New England. That towel has more ticks on it than I've seen in my life, and we're not exactly a low-Lyme area.
I did end up nuking the yard with pesticide that year.
Since then I've ground up the leaves this time of year and pile them up to compost them. In spring and summer I bag grass clippings and stuff those into the pile of composting leaves and it's amazing how hot those clippings get. Hot enough to roast any ticks in there for sure. So for the past few years we've had almost no ticks at all during the warm season. And I haven't had to use any pesticides.
And possums! When I learned 1) how utterly harmless possums are and 2) how voraciously they love to eat ticks, they became my favorite backyard visitors.
If you find a possum in your yard, leave ‘em be and count yourself lucky.
We have possums here too, and they occasionally come up to our front porch to eat our dogs food.
We also have a lot of deer here and they carry ticks that get huge on them, so they're spreading them around wherever they go. We're surrounded on 3 sides by Army Corp land that's forest and filled with critters that spread them around.
Yeah we've had quite a few chickens over the years, but we also have a lot of raccoons and fox and coyotes other chicken eating predators here. Just a couple years ago I was cleaning our coop and heard the chickens squawking like crazy and I ran outside to see what was causing the commotion and there was a Golden Eagle that had one of our chickens in it claws trying to fly off.
I'd never seen a Golden Eagle before and it is by far the biggest bird I've ever seen. They're huge! I yelled at it and waved my arms (trying to look big) and it finally let go and flew off.
Seconded. I grew up in southwest Missouri. When we came in from the woods or fields, the question was how many ticks you’d have to pull off you. It was guaranteed you’d have at least a couple.
I’m glad Lyme disease wasn’t as pervasive when I was a kid. At 2+ tick bites a day, every day, all summer, we couldn’t have beat those odds.
Well you for sure know what's it like here. We live on a ridge above a horseshoe bend on Bull Shoals lake and are surrounded hundreds of acres of public land that's forested.
I have hunting dogs that will pickup hundreds of ticks if not protected. I use Bravcto (Fluralaner) on them now, which is extremely effective. Hopefully lotilaner is similar with humans.
Most of the older generation of anti-tick meds have pretty substantial side effects and poor efficacy.
I've been using Bravecto and Nexgard for the past 4 years and it really should be emphasized how much of a seismic shift these meds have been.
I've had dogs all my life and live in a very tick-prone area. Nothing ever really worked, to be honest. It was a constant battle of attrition. I had to spray the house with nasty chemicals every few months cause that was pretty much the only thing that kind of tipped the balance against the ticks. I frankly don't know how we didn't get Lyme disease, we were exposed for decades.
Since these new meds appeared, ticks have completely disappeared from our property. They only provide 1-3 months of protection, but they're so effective at eradicating the parasite population that I've only had to use 3 pills in the past 4 years.
There might be external effects happening at the same time here.
I grew up on a island with a lot of ticks. Being a kid and spending time on fields and in forests, we constantly had to remove ticks before heading home.
But now 2 decades later, visiting the island again as an adult and expecting having to do the same after walking around the forest, we didn't find a single tick on ourselves, when it would easily have been a couple of ticks each in the before-days.
So many parameters being different though, so hard to reach any conclusion, maybe my blood is less attractive, maybe we weren't physically intensive enough, maybe the wrong season, but maybe there are other chemicals at play too that wasn't there before.
The consolidated FDA, Project Jake and EMA findings (Table 8) showed notable differences between survey populations regarding the percentage of neurological toxicity and serious AE, and fatal effects. Statistical analysis of these serious AE showed highly significant differences between the findings of the Project Jake survey and those reported by the FDA and EMA. While the number of death and seizure AE reported by the EMA was 7 to 10 times higher than those reported to the FDA, the reported responses for the Project Jake survey for death and seizures fell in between those of the FDA and EMA but aligned more closely with the EMA results. Furthermore, the number of reported death and seizure AE for lotilaner and spinosad were considerably higher than suggested with respect to their product labelling for potential neurological effects (Table 2 and and8).8).
But yes, the drug is "generally" safe for use. It's still worth being aware of the potential risks.
The link you posted has a notice right at the top saying the article has been corrected.
It links to a corrigendum adding a conflict of interest disclosure stating
> A Class Action lawsuit related to the use and safety of isoxazoline parasiticides was filed on December 27, 2019 in New Jersey, while this manuscript was undergoing peer review. One of the article's co‐authors, Valerie Palmieri, is the Plaintiff. [PALMIERI, et al. v. INTERVET INC, Case No. .2:19‐cv‐22024‐JMV‐AME (D. N. J.).]”
#1: Authorship is a big one, and the conflict of interest developing during the review process shows that these are not disinterested researchers.
#2: The type of study is a nearly worthless type, in that it has no real statistical control and is just asking people to report on things on the internet. What ends up happening with these studies is that people self-recruit by word of mouth. Survey respondents may have been asked by other participants to register adverse events, and survey respondents may have never given the medication to a pet or seen an adverse event. There is no controlling for that apparent in the study.
#3: The survey instrument is supposed to be in the appendix and it is not, yet it is not described. Their recruitment process is described only as "distributed electronically by mail throughout the United States to veterinarians, veterinary clients, pet caregivers/owners, kennel club groups and on social media sites between August 1 and 31, 2018." There are lots of complaints about the adverse-event reporting system, the worst is that adverse events are merely enumerated from reports and there is no real way to put them into a statistical study. This is just getting another enumeration of events and putting a different denominator under them.
In my prescribing I have seen only one adverse event worth reporting: a dog was heartworm positive and received ivermectin, doxycycline and afoxolaner at the same time. It had a transient episode of low blood pressure treated with fluids. For a drug that, in their denominator, gives 80+% adverse reactions, that is very surprising. So, the study doesn't really pass the smell test.
There have been other drugs that have caused adverse reactions in significant numbers of patients. We stop using them immediately. The difference is very noticeable.
OMG, I went down the rabbit hole on this paper and it is bonkers. Their methodology is amateur hour. It's just an uncontrolled non-validated survey sent out by an activist group. What is their list of survey recipients based on? What were the demographic differences between responders and nonresponders? It's the science equivalent of a political push-poll (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_poll)
The first author is a business executive who launched a huge class-action against Merck without disclosing it in this paper, the only veterinarian in the authors has been cited for practicing without a license (https://www.ocregister.com/2021/10/26/founder-of-hemopet-in-...) and the senior author is an orthopedic surgeon with no relation to the field and has maybe one other publication.
If you browse around pet forums, or go wild with Google, you'll find all sorts of anecdotal reports of people who claim their pets died (with all sorts of terrifying symptoms etc) soon after taking these kinds of drugs.
Take from that what you want. It's anecdotal and non-scientific. But it concerns me enough that we keep our dogs on Nexgard only during the peak of tick season and not year round like the vets seem to want to push.
There are also known genetic differences in dogs that cause some to find various anti-parasiticals (esp heartworm) to be toxic to some herding breeds (border collies, aus. sheperds). We had our border collies tested for this before putting them on medications. (https://vcacanada.com/know-your-pet/multidrug-resistance-mut...)
That said, genetic diversity is higher in dogs than it is in humans.
Sorry to hear. Yeah this weird winter is super unusually warm where I am too, though we've fallen back into seasonal normals in the last week. I've been keeping an eye out for ticks, but so far nothing.
I've only ever seen deer ticks here, never black legged, but they're definitely in the area.
They are absolutely not safe at normal doses. They killed my 2 year old dog. There are thousands of dogs out there that experienced seizures from this class of drugs.
She had seizures within hours of giving her the stuff, and was dead within 48 hours.
I'll happily die on this hill of looking like an internet crank ranting about drug companies, but it was a traumatizing experience for my wife and I, and even worse for our dog.
It's weird that regardless of how many different ways you try to tell this to people they're still more than happy to give the benefit of the doubt to $307 billion dollar pharma company.
It’s about risk assessment. It would be awful to have one of the small percent of dogs that have bad reactions to those medicines. It’s also bad to have dogs crawling with ticks.
Where I grew up, having dogs get sick from tick bites was fairly common. Ever seen a collie with its ears packed with swollen ticks? That has to be miserable. The risk of the medicine was less than the risk of the bites in our case.
> Thanks to climate change and exploding deer populations, ticks are expanding their ranges—and carrying diseases with them.
We’ve had our first run ins with ticks in our suburban Chicago backyard recently. They were never an issue before, and never literally just outside the door. I’m sure the unseasonably warm start to the year is to blame.
Look into "tick tubes", which you scatter around your yard. Tick tubes have permethrin impregnated cotton inside them, which mice collect and use as bedding. Mice are a critical part of the tick life cycle. The permethrin kills ticks that feed on the mice, and over a season or two you can seriously eliminate infestations of ticks without indiscriminate pesticide spraying.
The good thing is, we're just approaching the best time to apply tick tubes, early spring to summer.
I've used this in the suburbs, and anecdotally it doesn't seem like any small critters are picking up the cotton at all. I guess I should be happy that I don't have any mice or rats in the area?
I was under the understanding that any animal with fur or feathers can carry ticks. It's probably also an issue that smaller animals that eat ticks, like possums, are getting squeezed out.
Ever since I found out that ticks carry a disease that makes you allergic to meat, I became extra worried about them. However, despite living in a major tick area, I've luckily never seen one. I just make it a point to wear long pants and sleeves when working in the yard and then immediately shower afterwards.
If you don’t mind some chemical treatments, a really effective combo is permethrin and picaridin.
Pick a set of outerwear to be your yard work clothing. I’ve got a pair of overalls, a light long sleeve shirt, and a hat. Treat them with permethrin. This doesn’t repel ticks and mosquitos, but can actually incapacitate or kill them on contact.
Tuck your pants in your boots, and sleeves in your gloves if you’re wearing any.
Every time before you go out, spray yourself (particularly any exposed skin) with the picaridin repellent.
I live in the middle of a forest that’s sitting on wetlands. The bugs are out of control here. I haven’t found a tick on me (not in me, on me at all) in years. I also get very, very few mosquito bites.
(If you don’t want to go this crazy… just long pants tucked in and some picaridin repellent before you go out is all my wife does and she’s had similar results, though spends less time outside and less wandering through dense forest and stuff.)
What's super interesting about Lyme disease is that the cycle is larval and nymphal ticks get infected from (typically) a rodent, then if they feed on a deer, not only does the deer not get infected, it appears to cure the tick. Also female ticks do not pass this on to their offspring.
I bought property in 2021 with significant tick pressure. I’ve pulled dozens of ticks off me in the first couple years. The past two years I’ve been spraying Heterorhabditis bacteriophora and have seen significant improvement in that time. I have a tractor with a boom sprayer, which helps with large coverage. Obviously this is not a variable you can control in the wild, but for me, it has been super helpful on private land.
"Heterorhabditis bacteriophora is a species of entomopathogenic nematode known commonly as beneficial nematodes. They are microscopic and are used in gardening as a form of biological pest control."
That's fascinating. Have you noticed any knock-on effects? E.g. fall in the number of other wildlife which might normally feed on those insects?
Nothing of note. I still see plenty of turkeys, frogs and possums. I spray the beneficials so that it does not harm other beneficial insects and I assume if there is a healthy population of insects in general, there is still enough food source for wildlife. I can’t think of anything that prefers ticks as their main diet.
> The experimental pill that Tarsus Pharmaceuticals is testing is a formulation of lotilaner, a drug that paralyzes and kills parasites by interfering with the way that signals are passed between their nerve cells.
Couldn't find a good description of mechanism of action on Wikipedia. I also have nerve cells that need to communicate and damaging them just to spite a tick seems counterproductive.
Not sure about the effects of lotilaner as described in the article, but flurolaner is the active ingredient in bravecto, a flea and tick medicine for dogs. There's a class action against the manufacturer as thousands of dogs have gotten seriously ill or killed from the drug. My 2 year old collie (no previous health issues) was poisoned and died after we gave her bravecto. She had several seizures within hours of giving her the dose and was dead within 48 hours.
I'm surprised that similar sounding drugs are making their way to humans. I'm not a chemist and I'm not sure how similar lotilaner and flurolaner are, but damn if I'm not suspicious.
> My 2 year old collie (no previous health issues) was poisoned and died after we gave her bravecto. She had several seizures within hours of giving her the dose and was dead within 48 hours.
That's awful and way too young. I hope the class action has a good outcome.
I mean, we had this stuff for pets for a long time. The basic idea is that yes, it's a lipid-soluble neurotoxin. Because it is fat-soluble, it spreads throughout various tissues and lingers for a good while, which is these pet formulations last for weeks or months.
And yes, it is technically a mammal neurotoxin too, although our bodies are better at compartmentalizing and managing the risk. Similarly, you don't drop dead if exposed to caffeine or nicotine, even though they are insect neurotoxins produced by plants to kill bugs.
But it cracks me up that we are flipping out about herbicides such as glyphosate or 2,5-D - both of which are plant growth regulators that have no real mechanism to cause obvious harm in animals - but we're a lot more flippant with actual animal neurotoxins such as permethrin.
I'm still waiting for nootkatone products to take off after reading about it in The Ultimate Hang back around 2011.
"The active ingredient, nootkatone, is found in Alaska yellow cedar trees (also known as the Nootka cypress), some herbs, and citrus fruits. Biologists in CDC's Division of Vector-Borne Diseases have found nootkatone to be an effective repellent and insecticide for use against ticks and mosquitoes."
It's super effective and completely natural without any drawbacks, but apparently hard to synthesize on a commercial scale.
It seems to me that what we want is something like this but spread through the deer and mouse populations instead. Because in the case of lyme spreading ticks, their (complicated) lifecycle involves both of those populations. Deer carry huge populations of ticks.
If drops of food laced with this kind of thing were given to deer, I'd expect it to drop the tick populations significantly. Without risk of human side effects.
That and we need to cull deer populations and encourage predators of mice generally.
I grew up in an area with pervasive cattle ticks. I've pulled them off of myself, and pulled thousands from our dogs. My father claims to have once seen a lizard with a tick on its eyeball.
Our solution was a bit of sulfur powder in the dog's food, and around the edges of the verandah, which was a home remedy suggested by the grey beards in the area. We never had any problems after that.
> About the VALOR trial
VALOR is an ongoing randomized, observer-blind, placebo-controlled Phase 3 trial which has enrolled 9,437* participants 5 years of age and older to receive VLA15 or a saline placebo (1:1 ratio). As part of the primary series, participants receive three doses of VLA15 within the first year at months 0, 2 and 5-9, and one booster dose 9-12 months after completion of the primary immunization.5 The final primary series vaccination for participants occurs just before the peak Lyme disease season for the region. Participants will be followed for the occurrence of Lyme disease. The trial is conducted at sites located in areas where Lyme disease is highly endemic across the U.S., Canada and Europe and has enrolled volunteers with a cleared past infection with Borrelia burgdorferi as well as Borrelia burgdorferi naïve volunteers.
There is lab data suggesting an interaction between LYMErix and certain genotypes potentially inducing arthritis, but the initial trial and post market surveillance data did not show any meaningfully elevated arthritis rates. However, post market surveillance was definitely hampered by the limited market uptake, fueled partly by the side effect concern.
Genetic testing/screening should be significantly cheaper today, and the higher prevalence of ticks as a concern would probably mean that LYMErix could probably be a viable product today, even if its arthritis side effect profile was real, as long as it was combined with screening.
It was around the time when vaccine and Autism mania was at its peak:
> Despite the lack of evidence that the complaints were caused by the vaccine, sales plummeted and LYMErix was withdrawn from the U.S. market by GlaxoSmithKline in February 2002, in the setting of negative media coverage and fears of vaccine side effects. The fate of LYMErix was described in the medical literature as a "cautionary tale"; an editorial in Nature cited the withdrawal of LYMErix as an instance in which "unfounded public fears place pressures on vaccine developers that go beyond reasonable safety considerations." The original developer of the OspA vaccine at the Max Planck Institute told Nature: "This just shows how irrational the world can be ... There was no scientific justification for the first OspA vaccine LYMErix being pulled.
A lot of us didn't grow up with ticks but have moved to places like the Bay Area where we do get them.
I think this serves as a good reminder that folks should be aware of common tick procedures like checking at the end of a walk if you have any and knowing how to remove them carefully (you don't just pull them, you have to get the mouthpiece out - tweezers are recommended).
I've already had a tick bite this year from a walk in Marin county which is quite early. Fortunately, I felt it bite me and was able to remove it quickly.
It's also worth noting you can get ticks tested for Lyme disease but it's about $40.
I’m in a rural area. For the last 3 years, we’ve had ticks. It was bad last year. Supposed to be really bad this year. I’m spraying permethrin this year. Unless someone here has a better idea..
Tick tubes. Permethrin sprayed directly will kill every beneficial insect as well and will just wash away after the first rain.
Tick tubes are toilet paper rolls filled with permethrin soaked cotton balls. Rodents collect the cotton balls to use as nesting material which kills the nymph ticks that live on them before they can mature into adults. You put then out in early spring and again in summer. You can either make them yourself (much cheaper) or buy them ready made.
I’m outside a lot. Live on a farm in mid-atlantic US. I’m not opposed to chemical solutions, but I have a pretty effective mechanical approach to ticks [1]. Basically it takes advantage of a tick’s inclination to walk upward. Tuck your pants into socks and shirt into pants. Wear colors that contrast with the tick body and CHECK YOURSELF!
I tried to interest any researcher in using an isoxazoline as a method of malaria control by offering it to people infected with malaria to protect their villages. The idea would be that mosquitoes that bite infected persons would die, reducing the population of infected mosquitoes.
Nobody wrote me back. If you are studying malaria and are interested in this approach, please run with it. I won't be sore.
Its so crazy, and I've lived in rural areas, been hunting in Ozark woods, I've never gotten bit by a tick. A friend of mine was literally covered in them one day after shooting stuff, he put one on my hand and it jumped off. Needless to say he was jealous.
If you could give this drug to Deer, cattle, horses, and other livestock, it would significantly reduce the tick population. Remember Lymes disease is caused by a tick biting a deer before it bites a human.
This will be game-changing if it works for the Nordics. Here in Finland, ticks are an ongoing nuisance carrying lyme and also TBE (which can be vaccinated against). They are almost unavoidable if you go into nature during the warmer months and walk past any bushes, or long grass. Finland is also covered in forest too, and they can often be found falling from trees on top of hammocks and tents.
Sign me up! As a botanist I used to work in some areas where it would not be unusual to remove hundreds of ticks from my field clothes in a day. Inevitably one or two would slip through.
What’s the mechanism? You swallow a pill and it what? Enters your bloodstream and eventually makes its way out of the pores on your skin all over your body? For weeks?
I live in Western Massachusetts and I can confirm this is objectively false. We have a ton of ticks here. You won't get lyme if it's on you for a few hours but if you get one on you and go to sleep you can get it by the time you wake up. It's more the longer it's on the more likely it is, but you absolutely can get it if it's been attached for only 12-18 hours.
I have a local doctor in my area that specializes in Lyme care. Doxycycline, Minocycline, herbs, supplements, and sleep. I have also taken the path of acupuncture and medical cannabis for supplemental pain management. Overall I'm doing better now!
Tick gut bacteria takes awhile, but tick borne viruses that multiply in their salivary glands, like Powassan virus, are much faster. 15 minutes transmissions.
It's one of those "the risk goes up the longer it's attached" type things. I can't find studies, but I presume it looks like a bell curve.
I know there's also a much higher risk of contracting diseases if you can't remove the tick in a careful way. If you smoosh it, or otherwise cause it enough distress that it regurgitates while still attached to you, that will also increase your chances.
If you live in tick areas, get a tick kit, people. They're cheap. Don't do what my dad did and use pliers.
Not if the GP is describing the rate of change of the probability of transmission as a bell curve. We can assume 0% transmission when the bite first occurs, and assume that chance gradually plateaus at some point. That would look like an S-shaped logistic curve, whose derivative is bell-shaped.
Most tick bites take 36-48 hours before you get infected (bell hump). But sometimes you get infected quickly (left tail) and sometimes it takes longer (right tail).
They’re the same thing; the bell curve is probability of being infected at time X specifically, and the S curve is the cumulative sum, that is, the probability you’ll have been infected by day X
Its well known here for past decade. Maybe having wife working as a doctor helps, but this info is freely available. Also, if you ever interacted with any doctor with suspicion of a tick bite, this is first thing they ask.
If you are outdoorsy type, this is should be around top of your list, just like knowing inside & out of say various mosquito-borne diseases and their spread vectors when traveling around.
I would suspect in earlier times they were not aware of why they got sick or had a fever. I think people are just not aware of how frequently ill the population was in general several hundred years ago, especially in cities, though not tick related.
Here in central europe ticks are a massive problem. Lyme's caused serious year long health issues for a family member. It also almost killed my dog when he caught one of his first ticks ever.
I also do "checks", avoid tall grasses and have the whole system for management of my family's "tick security" (sometimes with their complain in the background). However, studying this problem basically every single summer I once found the alternative explanation as to why tick population today explodes globally in moderate climates.
Collapsed deer predator population[0]. Deer and small rodent populations are unchecked because predators can't thrive in ecologically stressed areas (There's little to no wild forests of enough of the size for wolf in most of Europe). Herbivores had far easier time adapting to the transformed environment compared to their natural predators. They also get less hunted by humans, obviously.
No amount of DEET will solve that. There's also no need to CRISP'r anything or spend a decade of research on poor quality vaccination. This is system's fragility problem.
Then again... ticks were a very common occurrence for the first settlers in North America. There're diary entries mentioning them "in swarms" explicitly. But, what's different today is that you don't need to be even close to a deer trail to get 23 ticks of your dog after the walk.
I grew up in an area where tickborne encephalitis is endemic. For those who don't know, tickborne encephalitis is a delightful viral disease, with 5% lethality rate and a real chance of neurological damage in case of recovery. Oh, and the virus also persists throughout the whole life and can re-activated by antibiotics or other kinds of immune stress.
Our trips to the woods looked like a visit to a BSL-4 lab. Tightly buttoned shirts, long sleeves, checking each other after a visit, etc.
Having to take a pill every few weeks seems like a major impediment to use. I could see certain hikers or forestry workers taking these pills but for your average few weekends a season camper, this isn’t the right solution given the cadence with which you need to take the pill.
What about the vaccine that was near approval a few decades ago?
I live in an hot spot of tick borne Lyme disease (had Lyme once so far) so I would have to take these constantly as I'm constantly outside and I'm not hiking or in the woods. Ticks are everywhere here and with the lack of snow this winter they were active during the winter too.
Right, but the average person would go on a trip requiring these pills very, very sporadically. Imagine going camping or hiking irregularly throughout the year but needing to take these pills 20+ times? Seems crazy to me when there was an effective vaccine at one point.
Ticks carry a lot more than Lyme though, and many of the diseases they carry can have long-term or life-long effects. Even with a Lyme vaccine I think it'd be worth it to take these if you're gonna be in a tick-heavy area.
> Right, but the average person would go on a trip requiring these pills very, very sporadically. Imagine going camping or hiking irregularly throughout the year but needing to take these pills 20+ times?
Couldn't you just take it a few days before you go camping or hiking each time?
I would love to have this pill available and don't see this as an issue. The ticks numbers really spike for about a month in the spring when they come out in force which is when I'd probably try to be on something like this. When spring dries out and turns to summer ticks are far less common here (Wisconsin) so you probably wouldn't be on it. Sometimes you'll get a little uptick in the fall but spring is the only time I'm really concerned about it.
of course, but Lyme is most prevalent and, I'd like vaccines for rocky mountain etc. as well, and there are efforts towards each (Well probably not for the alpha gal sensitivity caused by lone star ticks).
there was an actual ready to go vaccine for Lyme, LYMERix, which was pulled because it was not profitable. That's the problem there, which is that vaccines should be made available even if they are not "profitable".
> The experimental pill that Tarsus Pharmaceuticals is testing is a formulation of lotilaner, a drug that paralyzes and kills parasites by interfering with the way that signals are passed between their nerve cells.
Who knows what effect this has on signals between our own nerve cells. Yikes.
They target gamma-aminobutyric acid chloride channels (GABACl) that aren't present in mammals. There is a relatively narrow therapeutic index in animals, but generally felt to be safe at approved doses. They're given to millions of animals, so we'd probably know if there was a problem.
It's easier and more plausible than a rat poison that doesn't hurt people; harder and less plausible than an antibiotic that doesn't hurt people; ultimately the proof is in the pudding.
Personally I would not try this in a long lasting formulation, only something oral that washes out completely in a few hours, unless it had been on the market for quite a long time
People also believed that pesticides like Roundup only affect insects. However, after a few decades it is becoming clearer that there is a link with Parkinson's.
I've also been suspicious of the long lasting topical antiparasitics for cats - The drugs are targeted to glutamate gated chloride channels which mammals don't have, but, off target binding to excitatory glutamate receptors (AMPA/NMDA) is still possible in theory and likely in practice given the adverse/overdose effect is seizures. I'd like to think seizurey behavior should be obvious, but subacute excitotoxicity is harder to characterize - usually is only mentioned in the context of cognitive damage from chronic subacute seizures.
But on the other hand it's good at keeping the ticks from attaching to my cat so they can all move on to me as I sleep, totally worth it
I think existing anti-tick chemicals works the same way, at least from my amateur understanding. Flumethrin (which is used as anti-tick in the collar we use for our dogs) targets the nervous system of parasites, which I understand to be the same approach as what Tarsus Pharmaceuticals is testing.
We probably know a lot about how it does or does not affect humans. "Just asking questions" from an unscientific perspective is why we have people saying things like "GMOs eat the lining of your stomach!"
Why bother killing the tick after a tick bite has delivered Lyme's Borrelia burgdorferi spirochete? Even if it's effective at killing ticks, it won't stop Lyme transmission.
And for it to be effective at killing ticks, the human has to be completely steeped in this GABA channel blocker paralytic.
The eye drops offer no real safety guarantees because the dosages are no where near comparable. The human study of surface skin had no data on bites and a short observation period of 6 weeks (roughly the 11-day half-life x 5 half-lives to wash out the dose?).
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The reported cost for ophthalmic 10ml solution of 0.25% lotilaner/Xdemvy for mites is ~$2k.
Reported adverse effects in dogs of lotilaner from 2013-2018 were only ~250, compared to 4k-18K for other drugs (no data on prevalence/usage).
It works as a GABA channel inhibitor (neurologic paralytic), specific to mites and perhaps ticks. No effect found in mammalian cells at ~11K/daily dosage for the ophthalmic drops.
Human blepharitis study had ~400 people in treatment arm over 6 weeks, ~50% effective.
Half-life of 11 days. No reported reversal agent. So if it is toxic, you're out of luck.
The optical solution is a tiny amount in the eyes, so little systemic exposure risk.
The tick pill involves much more systemic exposure via blood, so the eye drop experience says almost nothing about risk to humans.
I imagine the exposure to the tick from a blood bite is 10-1000x what it is from walking on the skin, so it's not clear to me this would stop lyme's Borrelia burgdorferi from being transmitted with the initial bite.
> Even if a tick is attached, it must have taken a blood meal to transmit Lyme disease. At least 36 to 48 hours of feeding is typically required for a tick to have fed and then transmit the bacterium that causes Lyme disease.
I got into archery during covid and would haul a target out onto some grasslands and shoot. My buddy and I would pull half a dozen ticks off ourselves at the end. I'd find ticks half dead on my car dash the next day.
We bought "tick pants". Pants coated in some chemical that does something like this. Tuck them into our boots.
No more ticks.
Clothes coated in this drug seems like a good alternative to actually consuming the drug in my opinion.
Also I've been trying to spot a tick in the wild before it grabs me and have never done it. I want to see a "questing" tick, ie one that is holding on to the edge of a blade of grass with its arms out trying to grab something.