Tics

Living in Lyme disease country, I take them off with nail nippers or sharp dikes, and take a little skin with them (not deep enough to bleed).

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I use one of these for removing them from my dogs:

Works every time and never leaves the head behind.

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By the time you do that it is already too late. The problem with the micros= copic deer ticks is that you can't see them until they're already engorged = with blood and have made a nice spirochete deposit into your tissue. And yo= u don't have to go tramping through the brush to pick them up, they like to= float on air currents to go from place to place. You only need to be downw= ind of a migrating population to get them on you.

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The smallest deer ticks (larvae) hatch from eggs that don't usually get infected with Lyme disease. There is transmission from larval to later stages, but the larvae get it from their first blood meal on a host from the disease's natural reservoir in rodents. So, the smallest ticks don't usually transmit Lyme disease spirochetes. I don't know if that's true of other tick-borne diseases or not. From my experience, the larvae are visible, even before they are engorged. I've never heard of them being carried on air currents; if you have a reference for that I would like to read it. From what I've read, it's always worthwhile removing a tick, since the greatest risk of infection occurs on their voluntary withdrawal.

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microscopic deer ticks

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The nymphs are known to transmit the disease. It was the correlation between the increasing deer population and incidence of the as yet mystery illness that led the CDC to discover its origins in the 1970s in Connecticut.

microscopic deer ticks

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tramping through

place to place.

Connecticut.

The nymphs are the middle stage. The larvae aren't usually infectious. Yes, allowing the tick to withdraw using the force of its saliva is bad. In twenty-five years of jogging through the woods behind my house, I've collected many ticks of all three sizes. In the course of just pulling them off (or scraping with a sharp knife for the larvae), I've never had a case where the tick's head was left inside.

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If you look at the chart in the reference, you will see that it's the nymph= s that are responsible for most of the infections. This probably has to do= with people not noticing their bite for the 24 hours or so it takes to inf= ect, whereas with an adult bite, most people probably notice that immediate= ly, so not enough time to transmit the pathogen.

It might just be that your tissues are getting a bit flabbier, so that they simply engulf the tick without bursting it.

Sylvia.

Are you trying to say I am fat? :)

Jamie