I'm a deer hunter. I'm out in the woods scouting a few times in the late summer, then I'm out there every day in the fall for about two months.
I treat everything with permethrine: clothes, socks, boots, hats, orange vest, backpack, ground blind, even the tripod chair I sit on in the blind. Permethrine, derived from the chrysanthemum flower, kills ticks (as well as ants and bees). If one lands on your pants or shirt, it will quickly die. But permethrine is considered harmless to mammals once it's dry. It also doesn't hurt to spray some deet on your exposed skin (face, hands etc.). Permethrine survives several washings.
As soon as I come back from a hunt, I strip and take a hot scrub shower. This is probably the best way to rid them from your body before they latch on, which usually takes a few hours up to 24 or so before they settle in a desirable spot.
Reducing the deer population is an excellent way to reduce the adult tick vector; deer can travel quite far and spread tick populations quickly.
The nymph phase of the tick life cycle is slightly different; they are on mice and other rodents until they reach a certain size. You can actually reduce this population by putting out tick tubes everywhere in your yard, under brush, under wood piles, wherever rodents might tend to go. The tubes contain cotton or dryer lint sprayed with permethrine; the rodents take bits of the material back to line their nests, and it kills the baby ticks. I do this every spring, in the hopes it will rid the vicinity of many ticks.
Lyme is serious business and once you get it, it can take years if not forever to get rid of. Lymerix was a vaccine developed in the 1990s that was about 80% effective, but unfortunately an anti-vaccine group sued the company successfully and they pulled it off the market. The CDC subsequently determined there was no validity to the plaintiff's claims, but by then the deed was done. Probably hundreds of thousands of people suffer from Lyme today because of this lawsuit.
There are new vaccines in the pipeline that sound very promising; they target common proteins among the family of Lyme bacteria (there are about a dozen known species of borrelia bacteria) so that one shot should protect you. Of course, promising doesn't mean guaranteed, so we'll just have to wait and hope this thing can be beaten.
In the meantime, we can focus on attacking the vectors: reduce the overpopulation of deer and rodents that carry the ticks, encourage more use of permethrine and other insecticides. Monhegan Island, off the Maine coast, had 25% prevalence of the disease until they eradicated the deer population (originally brought there in the 1950s-60s as a tourist attraction) and new cases of Lyme went down to almost nil.
We can encourage more predators like hawks and owls and snakes, all of which work to keep the rodent population in check. Flocks of birds eat ticks, but bird populations have greatly decreased in recent decades, so we might think about ways to bring them back, perhaps through reforestation and limiting exurban development that removes habitat.
I treat everything with permethrine: clothes, socks, boots, hats, orange vest, backpack, ground blind, even the tripod chair I sit on in the blind. Permethrine, derived from the chrysanthemum flower, kills ticks (as well as ants and bees). If one lands on your pants or shirt, it will quickly die. But permethrine is considered harmless to mammals once it's dry. It also doesn't hurt to spray some deet on your exposed skin (face, hands etc.). Permethrine survives several washings.
As soon as I come back from a hunt, I strip and take a hot scrub shower. This is probably the best way to rid them from your body before they latch on, which usually takes a few hours up to 24 or so before they settle in a desirable spot.
Reducing the deer population is an excellent way to reduce the adult tick vector; deer can travel quite far and spread tick populations quickly.
The nymph phase of the tick life cycle is slightly different; they are on mice and other rodents until they reach a certain size. You can actually reduce this population by putting out tick tubes everywhere in your yard, under brush, under wood piles, wherever rodents might tend to go. The tubes contain cotton or dryer lint sprayed with permethrine; the rodents take bits of the material back to line their nests, and it kills the baby ticks. I do this every spring, in the hopes it will rid the vicinity of many ticks.
Lyme is serious business and once you get it, it can take years if not forever to get rid of. Lymerix was a vaccine developed in the 1990s that was about 80% effective, but unfortunately an anti-vaccine group sued the company successfully and they pulled it off the market. The CDC subsequently determined there was no validity to the plaintiff's claims, but by then the deed was done. Probably hundreds of thousands of people suffer from Lyme today because of this lawsuit.
There are new vaccines in the pipeline that sound very promising; they target common proteins among the family of Lyme bacteria (there are about a dozen known species of borrelia bacteria) so that one shot should protect you. Of course, promising doesn't mean guaranteed, so we'll just have to wait and hope this thing can be beaten.
In the meantime, we can focus on attacking the vectors: reduce the overpopulation of deer and rodents that carry the ticks, encourage more use of permethrine and other insecticides. Monhegan Island, off the Maine coast, had 25% prevalence of the disease until they eradicated the deer population (originally brought there in the 1950s-60s as a tourist attraction) and new cases of Lyme went down to almost nil.
We can encourage more predators like hawks and owls and snakes, all of which work to keep the rodent population in check. Flocks of birds eat ticks, but bird populations have greatly decreased in recent decades, so we might think about ways to bring them back, perhaps through reforestation and limiting exurban development that removes habitat.