The growing global battle against blood-sucking ticks
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The growing global battle against blood-sucking ticks
Scientists have no shortage of ideas about how to stop tick-borne illnesses. What is holding them back?
Melinda Wenner Moyer
25 August 2015
Robin Moore/robindmoore.com/Cary Instit.
Disease ecologist Rick Ostfeld says that Lyme disease should be tackled in part by targeting mice.
On a balmy day in late June, Scott Williams waits for a white-footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus) to fall asleep. Williams, a wildlife biologist with the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven, has just transferred the animal from a trap to a plastic bag containing a cotton ball doused in anaesthetic. As soon as the mouse's breathing slows to one breath per second, Williams will take it out, draw blood, weigh it, put an ear tag on it for identification and check the animal for ticks, saving any that are engorged with blood. He must work quickly. The mouse will wake up in about two minutes, and she might be grumpy.
Williams is testing whether vaccinating mice against Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease in the United States, can reduce the proportion of ticks that are infected. Health officials are looking on with interest. Connecticut has one of the highest rates of human Lyme disease in the country, and June is peak time for transmission. Borrelia burgdorferi infects an estimated 329,000 people in the United States each year, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. And although most people who get prompt treatment recover quickly — Williams has had Lyme three times — up to one in five develops long-term and potentially life-threatening symptoms, including heart, vision or memory problems, or debilitating joint pain.
Related stories
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Lyme bacterium's possible ancestor found in ancient tick
Lyme bacteria show that evolvability is evolvable
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Williams's approach is one of several strategies being tested in an attempt to thwart the spread of tick-borne diseases. Some, like the mouse vaccine, interrupt the pathogen's ecological circuitry by targeting the wild animals that pass along and amplify the disease. Others, such as efforts to revive a human Lyme vaccine, aim to protect people from infection directly. A more radical approach could hamper the ability of ticks to bite humans or animals, potentially protecting against dozens of illnesses spreading across the United States, Europe, Africa and Asia.
That the field needs creative solutions is clear. Many long-recommended interventions, such as pesticide application or controlling populations of deer, which are an important host for adult ticks, have had mixed success in scientific studies. Even the time-honoured protective strategies that most people use are not evidence-based. “We tell people to wear repellents, to do tick checks and to shower if they've been in the field, but there's very little data to show that these things reduce human illness,” explains Ben Beard, chief of the CDC's bacterial-diseases branch in the division of vector-borne diseases.
Diseases spread by ticks are on the rise around the world, spurred by a combination of factors, including shifting climates and population sprawl into rural areas. Reported cases of Lyme, the most common US tick-borne illness, have nearly tripled in the country since 1992, although some of the increase could be due to heightened awareness. Lyme is also a growing problem in parts of Europe, Mongolia and China. Yet as bad as it is, there are nastier threats on the rise. In parts of Africa, the Middle East, Asia and southern Europe, ticks can spread Crimean–Congo haemorrhagic fever, which is fatal in 40% of cases. And a tick-borne relapsing fever afflicts as many as 1 in 20 residents in parts of Senegal. In the United States, ticks spread at least 16 illnesses, including anaplasmosis, babesiosis, ehrlichiosis and Rocky Mountain spotted fever, all “serious, life-threatening infections”, Beard says. And many are increasing in incidence more quickly than Lyme. In a July 2015 position statement, the Entomological Society of America argued for a national strategy to combat tick-borne diseases. “The recent confluence of environmental, ecological, sociological, and human demographic factors,” it said, “has created a near 'perfect storm' leading to more ticks in more places throughout North America.”
Backyard battlegrounds
Williams tags, weighs and releases his mouse just in time. It has no ticks to bring back to the lab for further analysis, but there will be other opportunities. Members of 32 Connecticut households have volunteered to place traps around their properties, and some will also get boxes of mouse treats laden with vaccine. The hope is that, over time, fewer mice and ticks will harbour the bacteria at the sites with the vaccine bait.
The plan is unconventional, because most Lyme-control measures focus on white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), which have exploded in number in the United States over the past century as young forests have become increasingly fragmented by human development and large predators have been all but eradicated. Adult blacklegged ticks (Ixodes scapularis) typically feed and mate on deer, so many scientists have argued that the only way to get rid of Lyme is to get rid of the deer.
Aflo/Naturepl.com
The body of an adult ixodid tick expands as it feeds
But such efforts have had “an incredibly spotty record”, says Richard Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, who has been studying tick-borne diseases for decades.
When Sam Telford, an epidemiologist at Tufts University in North Grafton, Massachusetts, and his colleagues cut the deer population on Great Island in Cape Cod by 50% in the early 1980s, they saw no drop in tick numbers — the number of tick larvae on the island actually increased1. Ostfeld argues that you do not need many deer to maintain a large tick population. When deer numbers drop, ticks can either crowd in on the remaining deer or find other hosts. Only when almost all of the deer on Great Island had been eliminated did tick populations plummet. But, says Telford, “it is a nightmare trying to get the deer population down that low”. And anywhere that is not an island, keeping populations down is practically impossible.
Danger mouse
Ostfeld and others contend that mice are a major driver for both the tick problem and the disease problem. Mice, like deer, flourish in fragmented woodlands — in part because predators such as foxes and opossums get displaced. Ticks then thrive on the rodents, which are poor groomers. Studies suggest that larval ticks have a 50% chance of surviving when they feed on mice, but only a 3.5% chance on opossums2.
And mice are typically where ticks pick up B. burgdorferi. Most mice in Lyme-endemic areas get infected with the bacterium at a young age and, for reasons that are not completely clear, they are particularly good at transmitting it to other ticks. Almost all young ticks that feed on white-footed mice become infected, compared with a mere 1% of ticks that feed on deer. Interrupting the tick–mouse infection cycle, says Ostfeld, could make ticks a lot less dangerous.
Maria Gomes-Solecki, a medical microbiologist at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, agrees — which is why she invented the mouse vaccine that Williams is testing. It primes the mice to make antibodies against outer surface protein A (OspA), a molecule that B. burgdorferi expresses when it is in a tick's gut. A mouse eats the vaccine, then starts to produce OspA antibodies. The next time a tick feeds on the mouse, the antibodies attack the bacteria in its gut, clearing the infection. As the proportion of ticks infected with B. burgdorferi drops, it becomes less likely that the next generation of mice will pick up the parasite, even without vaccination.
Ostfeld and his colleagues reported the first field tests3 of Gomes-Solecki's vaccine in 2014, and found that although only 28% of the mice in an area that they targeted for 5 years developed protective levels of OspA antibodies, the prevalence of infected blacklegged-tick nymphs (the life stage between larvae and adults) dropped by 75%. The bait-based vaccine is also attractive because it is less ecologically destructive than other strategies — it does not kill animals or even ticks, just the pathogens.
Gomes-Solecki, who licensed her technology to a company she founded, US Biologic in Memphis, would like to see homeowners putting walk-through bait boxes for mice around their gardens. Or, she says, local governments could disperse the bait in parks or forests, much as they do with bait-based rabies vaccines for raccoons and coyotes. “The rodents seem to love them,” Williams says of the vaccine-laced treats. One of his colleagues calls them “Fritos for mice”.
Other scientists argue for more a direct means of protecting people against Lyme, ideally with a human vaccine. When vaccine researcher Stanley Plotkin's son was 35, he fell ill with Lyme disease. As often happens with the infection, a doctor missed the diagnosis and the young man went untreated for months. Bacteria invaded his heart and he collapsed one day while walking his dog. Plotkin, now an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, says that when paramedics arrived, his son's heart rate was dangerously low. He has since recovered, but the experience “further convinced me, if I needed any convincing”, Plotkin says, “that the lack of a Lyme-disease vaccine was a public-health tragedy”.
Plotkin worked on a vaccine in the 1990s. Ultimately, a competing product called LYMErix, manufactured by UK-based pharmaceutical company SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline), was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 1998. It reduced the risk of Lyme caused by US strains of Borrelia by 76% in clinical trials4. But it faced problems from the start. First, it garnered lukewarm support from health officials in the United States and was recommended only for people aged 15 to 70 in regions where Lyme is endemic. Then, some recipients complained of autoimmune-related side effects such as arthritis and filed lawsuits against SmithKline Beecham. The company voluntarily shelved LYMErix in 2002. Plotkin maintains that this was a mistake. “The vaccine was safe,” he says.
Now, a new and potentially improved vaccine has completed safety trials5. Developed by researchers at Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, and licensed to Baxter Innovations in Vienna, the vaccine is similar to LYMErix in that it targets OspA, but it does not contain the protein segment that some scientists and consumers feared could cause an autoimmune reaction. It also contains several variants of OspA, so it protects against many Borrelia species known to cause Lyme in humans, including those that affect people in Europe.
Nevertheless, the vaccine's future is uncertain: in 2014, Pfizer bought the rights to sell many of Baxter's vaccine products, but not the Lyme candidate. Baxter is now in talks with Great Plains Biotechnology of Roca, Nebraska, which has expressed interest in purchasing and developing the Lyme vaccine.
Read more:
http://www.nature.com/news/the-growing- ... ks-1.18227
[ Post made via iPad ]
Melinda Wenner Moyer
25 August 2015
Robin Moore/robindmoore.com/Cary Instit.
Disease ecologist Rick Ostfeld says that Lyme disease should be tackled in part by targeting mice.
On a balmy day in late June, Scott Williams waits for a white-footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus) to fall asleep. Williams, a wildlife biologist with the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven, has just transferred the animal from a trap to a plastic bag containing a cotton ball doused in anaesthetic. As soon as the mouse's breathing slows to one breath per second, Williams will take it out, draw blood, weigh it, put an ear tag on it for identification and check the animal for ticks, saving any that are engorged with blood. He must work quickly. The mouse will wake up in about two minutes, and she might be grumpy.
Williams is testing whether vaccinating mice against Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease in the United States, can reduce the proportion of ticks that are infected. Health officials are looking on with interest. Connecticut has one of the highest rates of human Lyme disease in the country, and June is peak time for transmission. Borrelia burgdorferi infects an estimated 329,000 people in the United States each year, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. And although most people who get prompt treatment recover quickly — Williams has had Lyme three times — up to one in five develops long-term and potentially life-threatening symptoms, including heart, vision or memory problems, or debilitating joint pain.
Related stories
Resurrecting the 'yuppie vaccine'
Lyme bacterium's possible ancestor found in ancient tick
Lyme bacteria show that evolvability is evolvable
More related stories
Williams's approach is one of several strategies being tested in an attempt to thwart the spread of tick-borne diseases. Some, like the mouse vaccine, interrupt the pathogen's ecological circuitry by targeting the wild animals that pass along and amplify the disease. Others, such as efforts to revive a human Lyme vaccine, aim to protect people from infection directly. A more radical approach could hamper the ability of ticks to bite humans or animals, potentially protecting against dozens of illnesses spreading across the United States, Europe, Africa and Asia.
That the field needs creative solutions is clear. Many long-recommended interventions, such as pesticide application or controlling populations of deer, which are an important host for adult ticks, have had mixed success in scientific studies. Even the time-honoured protective strategies that most people use are not evidence-based. “We tell people to wear repellents, to do tick checks and to shower if they've been in the field, but there's very little data to show that these things reduce human illness,” explains Ben Beard, chief of the CDC's bacterial-diseases branch in the division of vector-borne diseases.
Diseases spread by ticks are on the rise around the world, spurred by a combination of factors, including shifting climates and population sprawl into rural areas. Reported cases of Lyme, the most common US tick-borne illness, have nearly tripled in the country since 1992, although some of the increase could be due to heightened awareness. Lyme is also a growing problem in parts of Europe, Mongolia and China. Yet as bad as it is, there are nastier threats on the rise. In parts of Africa, the Middle East, Asia and southern Europe, ticks can spread Crimean–Congo haemorrhagic fever, which is fatal in 40% of cases. And a tick-borne relapsing fever afflicts as many as 1 in 20 residents in parts of Senegal. In the United States, ticks spread at least 16 illnesses, including anaplasmosis, babesiosis, ehrlichiosis and Rocky Mountain spotted fever, all “serious, life-threatening infections”, Beard says. And many are increasing in incidence more quickly than Lyme. In a July 2015 position statement, the Entomological Society of America argued for a national strategy to combat tick-borne diseases. “The recent confluence of environmental, ecological, sociological, and human demographic factors,” it said, “has created a near 'perfect storm' leading to more ticks in more places throughout North America.”
Backyard battlegrounds
Williams tags, weighs and releases his mouse just in time. It has no ticks to bring back to the lab for further analysis, but there will be other opportunities. Members of 32 Connecticut households have volunteered to place traps around their properties, and some will also get boxes of mouse treats laden with vaccine. The hope is that, over time, fewer mice and ticks will harbour the bacteria at the sites with the vaccine bait.
The plan is unconventional, because most Lyme-control measures focus on white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), which have exploded in number in the United States over the past century as young forests have become increasingly fragmented by human development and large predators have been all but eradicated. Adult blacklegged ticks (Ixodes scapularis) typically feed and mate on deer, so many scientists have argued that the only way to get rid of Lyme is to get rid of the deer.
Aflo/Naturepl.com
The body of an adult ixodid tick expands as it feeds
But such efforts have had “an incredibly spotty record”, says Richard Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, who has been studying tick-borne diseases for decades.
When Sam Telford, an epidemiologist at Tufts University in North Grafton, Massachusetts, and his colleagues cut the deer population on Great Island in Cape Cod by 50% in the early 1980s, they saw no drop in tick numbers — the number of tick larvae on the island actually increased1. Ostfeld argues that you do not need many deer to maintain a large tick population. When deer numbers drop, ticks can either crowd in on the remaining deer or find other hosts. Only when almost all of the deer on Great Island had been eliminated did tick populations plummet. But, says Telford, “it is a nightmare trying to get the deer population down that low”. And anywhere that is not an island, keeping populations down is practically impossible.
Danger mouse
Ostfeld and others contend that mice are a major driver for both the tick problem and the disease problem. Mice, like deer, flourish in fragmented woodlands — in part because predators such as foxes and opossums get displaced. Ticks then thrive on the rodents, which are poor groomers. Studies suggest that larval ticks have a 50% chance of surviving when they feed on mice, but only a 3.5% chance on opossums2.
And mice are typically where ticks pick up B. burgdorferi. Most mice in Lyme-endemic areas get infected with the bacterium at a young age and, for reasons that are not completely clear, they are particularly good at transmitting it to other ticks. Almost all young ticks that feed on white-footed mice become infected, compared with a mere 1% of ticks that feed on deer. Interrupting the tick–mouse infection cycle, says Ostfeld, could make ticks a lot less dangerous.
Maria Gomes-Solecki, a medical microbiologist at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, agrees — which is why she invented the mouse vaccine that Williams is testing. It primes the mice to make antibodies against outer surface protein A (OspA), a molecule that B. burgdorferi expresses when it is in a tick's gut. A mouse eats the vaccine, then starts to produce OspA antibodies. The next time a tick feeds on the mouse, the antibodies attack the bacteria in its gut, clearing the infection. As the proportion of ticks infected with B. burgdorferi drops, it becomes less likely that the next generation of mice will pick up the parasite, even without vaccination.
Ostfeld and his colleagues reported the first field tests3 of Gomes-Solecki's vaccine in 2014, and found that although only 28% of the mice in an area that they targeted for 5 years developed protective levels of OspA antibodies, the prevalence of infected blacklegged-tick nymphs (the life stage between larvae and adults) dropped by 75%. The bait-based vaccine is also attractive because it is less ecologically destructive than other strategies — it does not kill animals or even ticks, just the pathogens.
Gomes-Solecki, who licensed her technology to a company she founded, US Biologic in Memphis, would like to see homeowners putting walk-through bait boxes for mice around their gardens. Or, she says, local governments could disperse the bait in parks or forests, much as they do with bait-based rabies vaccines for raccoons and coyotes. “The rodents seem to love them,” Williams says of the vaccine-laced treats. One of his colleagues calls them “Fritos for mice”.
Other scientists argue for more a direct means of protecting people against Lyme, ideally with a human vaccine. When vaccine researcher Stanley Plotkin's son was 35, he fell ill with Lyme disease. As often happens with the infection, a doctor missed the diagnosis and the young man went untreated for months. Bacteria invaded his heart and he collapsed one day while walking his dog. Plotkin, now an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, says that when paramedics arrived, his son's heart rate was dangerously low. He has since recovered, but the experience “further convinced me, if I needed any convincing”, Plotkin says, “that the lack of a Lyme-disease vaccine was a public-health tragedy”.
Plotkin worked on a vaccine in the 1990s. Ultimately, a competing product called LYMErix, manufactured by UK-based pharmaceutical company SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline), was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 1998. It reduced the risk of Lyme caused by US strains of Borrelia by 76% in clinical trials4. But it faced problems from the start. First, it garnered lukewarm support from health officials in the United States and was recommended only for people aged 15 to 70 in regions where Lyme is endemic. Then, some recipients complained of autoimmune-related side effects such as arthritis and filed lawsuits against SmithKline Beecham. The company voluntarily shelved LYMErix in 2002. Plotkin maintains that this was a mistake. “The vaccine was safe,” he says.
Now, a new and potentially improved vaccine has completed safety trials5. Developed by researchers at Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, and licensed to Baxter Innovations in Vienna, the vaccine is similar to LYMErix in that it targets OspA, but it does not contain the protein segment that some scientists and consumers feared could cause an autoimmune reaction. It also contains several variants of OspA, so it protects against many Borrelia species known to cause Lyme in humans, including those that affect people in Europe.
Nevertheless, the vaccine's future is uncertain: in 2014, Pfizer bought the rights to sell many of Baxter's vaccine products, but not the Lyme candidate. Baxter is now in talks with Great Plains Biotechnology of Roca, Nebraska, which has expressed interest in purchasing and developing the Lyme vaccine.
Read more:
http://www.nature.com/news/the-growing- ... ks-1.18227
[ Post made via iPad ]
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- Zap
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Re: The growing global battle against blood-sucking ticks
Vaccine developed on Long Island, NY?
Some folks say lyme's originated at the Plum Island bio weapons research center in Long island, NY.
Some folks say lyme's originated at the Plum Island bio weapons research center in Long island, NY.
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Re: The growing global battle against blood-sucking ticks
They really - really suck!
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Re: The growing global battle against blood-sucking ticks
First cases were in Lyme, Ct......15 miles from Plum Island.
1974?
1974?
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Re: The growing global battle against blood-sucking ticks
I hate ticks.
You can fool some of the bucks, all of the time, and fool all of the bucks, some of the time, however you certainly can't fool all of the bucks, all of the time.
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Re: The growing global battle against blood-sucking ticks
Oh great, I think I just felt one on the back of my neck.........
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Re: The growing global battle against blood-sucking ticks
Just pulled one yesterday. Third one this year. So far no symptoms. (knock on wood!)
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Re: The growing global battle against blood-sucking ticks
3rd one only? I have pulled off hundreds. Mybe even 1,000. One time, I baited a bear for a friend. After getting out of the woods. I pulled off 250 when I stopped counting. I puled off around 250 more .
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Re: The growing global battle against blood-sucking ticks
Thats more deer ticks than we have in Lyme. Be careful. I've had Lyme disease once before. Its no joke. I didn't realise you guys had the same infestation of deer ticks like we do.
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Re: The growing global battle against blood-sucking ticks
They're getting more and more prevalent here in western NY. Saturated in the mounting and downstate by the city
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Re: The growing global battle against blood-sucking ticks
We have them pretty bad here in SE Mass. I use a product called Sawyer Permethrin. I've never had a tick live longer than a few minutes after picking it up on my clothing. When walking through the woods I check myself and wear light colored cloths making them easy to find. When I see I've picked one up I watch it. They crawl for about a few minutes, get twitchy and fall off of you.
I never go in the woods without using the stuff. Honestly I don't know how you guys do it.. I wouldn't go out in the woods if it wasn't for the stuff. Lyme is bad around here... My mother just finished her dose of the antibiotics for lyme... The disease messed her up good. Thankfully she's on the mend.
I never go in the woods without using the stuff. Honestly I don't know how you guys do it.. I wouldn't go out in the woods if it wasn't for the stuff. Lyme is bad around here... My mother just finished her dose of the antibiotics for lyme... The disease messed her up good. Thankfully she's on the mend.
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Re: The growing global battle against blood-sucking ticks
My area of MN is considered a hot zone, wife got the disease and a couple neighbors have been hit. I know of dozens of others in the area. We got a couple dozen chickens this year and they have been tearing apart the yard so I am hoping to see far less ticks next year. Not unusual to pull 5-20 a day off me and the kids in May and June and that is just in the yard, we aren't venturing in the thick stuff. During scouting season I have pulled off 30 to 40 a day.
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Re: The growing global battle against blood-sucking ticks
ticks are better then chiggers......
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Re: The growing global battle against blood-sucking ticks
I hope they find a good biological control for ticks. I know the fungus Metarhizium anisopliae has shown promise. I hope it turns out to be a good option.
When I hunted KY I noticed there were very few fawns around even though the habitat was great because of an ice storm that took off a large percentage of tree tops allowing sunlight to reach the forest floor. I also knew they have a real bad tick problem. Deer numbers stayed low and fawn numbers were very, very low so I looked into it and found out the ticks were actually killing a lot of fawns.
Hundreds and hundreds of the rotten things were getting in the eyes, nose, mouth, etc of newborn fawns and when they get engorged they cause pain as well as block airways. Seeing a picture of a newborn fawn laying there with nose plugged with engorged ticks, eye 90% covered, etc and trying to survive really made me feel sorry for the fawn. I cannot stand the rotten little creatures. I hope they come up with a safe way to lay waste to the little buggers.
When I hunted KY I noticed there were very few fawns around even though the habitat was great because of an ice storm that took off a large percentage of tree tops allowing sunlight to reach the forest floor. I also knew they have a real bad tick problem. Deer numbers stayed low and fawn numbers were very, very low so I looked into it and found out the ticks were actually killing a lot of fawns.
Hundreds and hundreds of the rotten things were getting in the eyes, nose, mouth, etc of newborn fawns and when they get engorged they cause pain as well as block airways. Seeing a picture of a newborn fawn laying there with nose plugged with engorged ticks, eye 90% covered, etc and trying to survive really made me feel sorry for the fawn. I cannot stand the rotten little creatures. I hope they come up with a safe way to lay waste to the little buggers.
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Re: The growing global battle against blood-sucking ticks
Have any of you treated your clothing with permethrin? I did last year and didn't get one on me. The week before I had upwards of 50 seed ticks on my arms and stomach.
Ooops, edit - Just noticed ThePreBanMan mentioned Sawyers - that's exactly what I use in early season.
Ooops, edit - Just noticed ThePreBanMan mentioned Sawyers - that's exactly what I use in early season.
Last edited by twksk8 on Thu Aug 27, 2015 2:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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