Living with Ticks - Before and After Suffering from Lyme Desease

Regardless how much we try to prepare - I don't seem to stop from getting goosebumps when I hear about ticks or see one. About 5 years ago I got bitten by a tick which resulted with getting infected with Lyme and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. I was flat on my back and sick as a dog. Including what's called "brain fog" - resulted in getting lost in the areas where I usually drive around.

Over 2 years of treatment - I am thankful to say that Dr. Carolyn Walsh in Leesburg was able to treat me. Now I am 90% recovered - and being as careful as I can be for myself and the family about ticks.

With that said, we are also being vigilant about not to expose ourselves to toxic chemicals, or cause unnecessary harm to other living insects that we should not be harming.

The reality is that you can't be too careful with ticks. I check myself regularly and remind the kids daily to check themselves. We also do daily vacuuming - thanks to the help of Roomba-it makes it easier to make it a routine to just charge it and let it do the work one room at a time.

I wanted to share some information and alternative treatment options for your outdoors.

Anti-Tick Products Contain Toxic Chemicals
Modern science has devised many ways to keep ticks at bay, most involving harsh chemicals with dubious safety records. Indeed, according to a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council(NRDC), the majority of tick products on the market today contain toxins, known collectively as organophosphate insecticides (OPs), which not only kill insects but can also damage the nervous systems of pets and people.

Studies have shown that children exposed to OPs may face increased risk of health problems later in life, including cancer and Parkinson’s disease. One recent study showed that people with any history of in-home exposure to insecticides containing OPs faced twice the risk of Parkinson’s as the rest of the population. In addition, four OPs used in pet products increase cancers in lab animals, and as such may cause cancer in humans.

One study showed children of pregnant women exposed to products containing OPs to be 250 percent more likely than those in a control group to develop brain cancer before the age of five. According to NRDC, pesticides that contain the OPs chlorpyrifos, dichlorvos, phosmet, tetrachlorvinphos, naled, diazinon and Malathion should be avoided, and regulated much more stringently by government.

Manage Your Habitat to Avoid Ticks
While there is no environmentally safe and effective way to spray buildings or backyards to fight ticks, the Bio-Integral Resource Center urges an approach that manages the habitat in and around your home to make it less hospitable to ticks:

Ticks are attracted to humidity, so deep and infrequent watering of your lawn will let it dry out between applications.

Vegetation should be cut below ankle height, the brush along paths and roadways removed, and trees pruned to let the light through. This will also make your property less appealing to animal hosts such as rabbits, rodents, possum, raccoons and deer.

Further steps include placing soap, hair, garlic, lilac, jasmine or holly—all with deer-repelling qualities—around your property.

For Tick Prevention, Pay Special Attention to Your Pets and Yourself
Because pets are frequent carriers, their sleeping quarters should be vacuumed frequently. NRDC also recommends that pet owners ask their veterinarian about dog and cat collars containing fipronil, a chemical that blocks nerve transmission in insects but has little if any effect on people or pets.
The best advice when exploring the outdoors during tick season is to always cover yourself from head to toe, and to wear light-colored clothing so you can spot ticks more easily if they do get on you. Search yourself thoroughly, particularly at the base of your skull, and wash your clothes immediately after returning home.

Damminix Tick Tubes®
Damminix Tick Tubes® are biodegradable, cardboard tubes filled with permethrin treated cotton balls. Mice collect the cotton to build their nests. Deer ticks that feed on mice in the Spring and the Fall are exposed to permethrin and killed. All the while, the mice, other mammals and your lands are unharmed and undisturbed.

Controlling Deer Ticks
Deer ticks have a two year life cycle.
Spring year 1 - Eggs are laid.
Summer year 1 - The larval ticks feed on a mouse or other small animal. If the animal they have fed on has been previously infected with the Lyme bacteria, the larva now becomes infected.

Fall year 1 - Larvae molt into nymph which remain dormant until the spring of year 2.

Spring and Summer year 2 - Nymphs feed on mouse or other small animal. Also may feed on humans. If nymph has been infected with Lyme bacteria when fed as a larva, then it can pass on the Lyme bacteria to its host. This is the stage that usually infects humans.

Fall year 2 - Nymph molts into adult. Adults gather on deer or other large animal to mate. Female also feeds at this time. If infected, the adult female may pass on the lyme disease bacteria when she feeds, but the adult tick is much larger than the nymph and more likely to be noticed by a human and removed before infection occurs, so is not as likely to cause Lyme disease as the Nymph.

As the population of deer grows, so grows the number of deer ticks and the spread of Lyme disease. So what is one to do? One option is to soak your clothes in Permanone. Permanone is a permethrin product that kills ticks on contact. The way it works is you spray a set of clothes in Permanone and let it dry for a couple of hours. At this point the clothes are safe for you to wear, but not safe for a tick. If you follow the directions on the Permanone bottle correctly, the permanone should be effective for about 6 weeks.

Since the Damminix Tick Tubes consist of a tube, cotton and Permanone, I figured it would be pretty easy to make my own tick tubes at a fraction of the cost. After only one year of having placed my homemade tick tubes in my back yard, I have noticed a sharp decrease in the number of ticks I am encountering. Of course, I have not done a scientific study of the effectiveness of my Tick Tubes, but I am willing to continue to offer the mice Permanone soaked cotton as long as my tick numbers seem to be down.

Materials:

• 2” PVC pipe
• cotton balls
• Permanone – 10% Permethrin can be found in Amazon

Instructions:
• Important! Follow all of the instructions on the Permanone package.
• Cut a 6 inch length of PVC pipe or toilet paper rolls - Cut enough pieces of pipe to place a tick tube every 10 feet or so along a rock wall or foundation.

• Lay out the cotton balls on a piece of newspaper
• Spray the cotton balls until they are soaked through
• Let the cotton balls dry for at least two hours.
• Place 4 cotton balls in each tube and place them along the rockwall or foundation.

 

I believe the maximum distance between tick tubes is 10 yards not 10 feet. Permethrin is extremely toxic to aquatic animals and organisms and caution should be used in placement and disposal of them. Many people believe Permethrin is safe because it is found in the Chrysanthemum plant. Do not be misled. It is toxic.

Since mice like nesting material, the saturated cotton balls are taken into their nest and kill the ticks on the adult and baby mice. Over time, the tick population is reduced.

What most people do not know is that field mice (not all) harbor the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi (Bb) which cause Lyme Disease. It does not come from deer. Deer are vectors only so "deer tick" is a misnomer. Only mice can transmit the bacteria.

Ticks can found on multiple bird species and small mammals like squirrels, voles, foxes, rabbits. Ticks need to be eradicated at the larval and nymph stage which is why tick tubes are so efficient, but the tubes must be placed during spring and summer and employed successively over several seasons in order to be effective.

The CDC claims you cannot contract Lyme through a mosquito bite, but if we can contract West Nile virus and Malaria (Lyme known as a variant of malaria), which is why it is so difficult to treat in the later stages, then any blood feeding organism (IMO) can transmit disease.

You can purchase tick tubes direct from the manufacturer at http://www.ticktubes.com, but it is cheaper to make your own.

 

Thanks for the info KTdid. I am not 100% sure about the distance and i got the info online. Certainly overwhelming info available and there is also more FAQ for additional stuff on here
http://www.ticktubes.com/faq.html

If I find anything on the distance I will post. But it sounds to me that this can be a better option to use for tick control. We are actually in the process of starting to do it.

This solution is also available in different strengths -from 10% to over 35%. It looks like Damminix is using 10% so we will get that probably.

 

I actually was recently given this website for reliable information so I wanted to share this as well.

http://www.tickencounter.org/

 

That's a good website Oya. I wanted to add...REI sells the clothing tick protectant spray but I think it lasts for 12 washings only. If you use it, wear a mask and spray it outdoors in a sheltered (no-wind) area.