Transcript

00:00:02 Speaker 1

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Naturally speaking podcast. I'm summer naturalist intern Tadd Ledoux with Nature Up North. And today, I'm here to present the topic of tick season 2024. Tick season 2024 is something I had heard a lot about from community members, my coworkers, it's been on my mind, and I wanted to learn more. So, I went to UMass Amherst professor, tick researcher, and my uncle, Stephen Rich. He's taught me everything I've known about ticks since I was growing up, and I figured he would have some answers about what we're seeing now and how things have changed, what actions we can take as community members who want to get outside. So, I hope that sharing these conclusions with all of you can really glean some insight, and I'm excited to present them to you. And I hope you enjoy.

00:00:52 Speaker 1

Hello. Naturally speaking, podcast listeners. Today I'm here with UMass Amherst. Professor, tick expert, and my uncle, Stephen Rich. Uncle Steve, would you like to introduce yourself to all the viewers at home?

00:01:06 Speaker 2

Sure. So, my name is Steven Rich and I'm a professor of microbiology here at UMass, and I'm the executive director of the New England Center of Excellence in Vector Borne Diseases. I've been doing work on ticks and tick borne diseases and a little bit with mosquitoes for the past 30-30 years.

00:01:22 Speaker 1

OK. Yeah. And I thought maybe to introduce the viewers I guess we could talk about the time, I  don't remember if you remember, but when I was younger and there was the tick that bit me that we sent you to test and it was tested that had Lyme disease. Do you remember that?

00:01:39 Speaker 2

Right. I remember it well. In fact, I remember the the start of that story was I happened to be on the phone with your mother. And she said Tadd has has ringworm.

00:01:41 Speaker 1

Yeah.

00:01:50 Speaker 2

And I said, oh. And so I said, I don't know if I asked her, but she sent me a picture of your- basically, the plumbers area of your body.

00:02:01 Speaker 1

Yeah, yeah, I'm sure the viewers can picture it.

00:02:05 Speaker 2

And it showed a little rash that went around the back lower back of your side of your body. And it was a perfect circle. If it was on a flat part of your body, but it wasn't flat because your body is not flat there. That was what your mom thought was ringworm. And I was like, that is that is Lyme disease that's 100% Lyme disease. And she took you to the doctor. And sure enough, they confirmed it. But it was such a great story that I kept that picture that was on my phone. And for many times when I would do talks and, you know, outreach talks and even medical conferences I  would go and I would say yeah, this classic rash, which is called erythema migrans, doesn't always look like a perfect bullseye because if your skin's not on a flat, it's not a flat part of your body. It's going to look more like a Kidney bean kind of shape, using your picture to show many people what that looks like.

00:02:58 Speaker 1

Well, I'm. I'm glad that that at least something good came out of it. I did it for science, I can say.

00:03:03 Speaker 2

And you got better. That's the good news.

00:03:03 Speaker 1

Yeah. And I got better and I'm all good now. Yeah. So, Uncle Steve, if you don't mind, I had a couple questions about this season, this tick season. I've heard a lot of things. I don't know what I can make sense of and what I can't. So, I thought maybe I'd come to you. And, you know, I guess bring that information to our viewers, and I just have a couple of questions here if you'd like to chat.

00:03:28 Speaker 2

Yeah, I'm. I'm glad you're asking because there's so much misunderstanding about ticks and so maybe some we can clarify some of that.

00:03:36 Speaker 1

Yeah, OK, cool. So the first question I have here, this is just kind of more a broader question about ticks. Where do they tend to live? What is their kind of day-to-day behavior? What do they do for hunting? How do they react to environmental changes? I guess just an ecological overview of what ticks are like outside of their human interaction.

00:03:58 Speaker 2

Wow, that's a lot. I hope I don't say too much. So ticks are very interesting. They're not like mosquitoes. I always try to compare them with mosquitoes because people know mosquitoes a little bit better. If you've ever seen a mosquito land on you, and if you were maybe brave enough to let that mosquito bite you, you know that that mosquito will land. And it's she. It's a female that lands and feeds. And she feeds for less than a minute. Then she flies away and she can do that several times in the course of a summer, she uses that blood meal to make babies. Basically, after she mates with a male. Ticks are very different. Ticks feed once in each of the life stages, and the total lifespan takes two years, so they feed once as a larvae. They use all of that blood meal that they take to digest and over several months they grow up to be nymphs, which are like teenage ticks, and then they'll take a second blood meals and nymph. One more blood meal, they'll use that blood meal to molt and become an adult, and then when they're adults, the males will not feed. They just spend their life looking for females and the females will take one more. That's the third in their lifespan. One more blood meal and they'll use all that blood. And by use that blood, I mean the energy that they get from that diet to make masses and one tick can lay 2000 to 3000 eggs in one go, so that's why we end up with a real tick problem because if one female can get 3000 offspring, you're suddenly in, you're in trouble.

00:05:25

Yeah.

00:05:31 Speaker 2

So where do they live? They don't live in short grass. So, if you have a nice manicured lawn where you keep the grass cut or you've had hardscapes like, you know, concrete patios or here we have a lot of stone patios. They don't like that at all. They like leaf litter. They like places where they can get down in the litter and the reason for that is ticks, believe it or not, are very vulnerable to environmental conditions. They dry out very easily, and given that they live 2 years, and they only feed three times in those two years and they don't drink any water, but they have a very tight energy budget and a very tight hydration budget so they can't lose water at any at a certain rate. So what they do is they like to be in leaf litter and they like to go in and out of the leaf litter, so they go down in the leaf litter when it's very dry. And that's where they can stay moist and then they have to come out of that leaf litter because the main thing they do in their life is try to find something to take a blood meal and they if they're in the leaf litter at the bottom, they won't find anything. So they have this behavior called questing, where they crawl up to the end of a branch or or a twig and then they come out and they put their legs out and they wait for something to come by and then they grab on to it. That's a ticks lifespan, and then once they're on, they have a very complex feeding process that the only thing I'll say about that, unless you have other questions is don't think of a ticks feeding like as the same as a syringe. When you go to the phlebotomist and he or she takes blood from you, it's a very complex and detailed process that involves, and this is before lunch, so I can be a little bit gross about it, but it's spitting and slurping and spitting and slurping, They repeatedly over the course of 48 hours, sometimes up to seven days that they're taking to do that feeding. So it's a very complex process. It's not like sticking needle and sucking out blood.

00:07:35 Speaker 1

Yeah, that would be like the mosquito, like you were talking about.

00:07:39 Speaker 2

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you got it.

00:07:41 Speaker 1

Yeah, I that I have two follow up questions kind of from that. You said that that that one female will lay about 3000 eggs, right?

00:07:49 Speaker 2

Yeah.

00:07:50 Speaker 1

How many of those eggs are usually likely to like reach maturity? I guess, what's the survival rate on those offspring?

00:07:58 Speaker 2

Yeah, that's a good question and not one that we have a good answer for, but one of the reasons they lay so many eggs is that they are selected. That's something that we talk about, like insects, and Ticks are not insects, Arthropods, but they tend to lay many more babies than they know are going to survive, so that they get survival for the next generation. And I don't have a percentage for what the ownership is, but I can tell you that it's relatively high because we see very thick density of nymphal ticks or, sorry, larval ticks in the in the late summer coming off those.

00:08:31 Speaker 1

OK.

00:08:32 Speaker 1

Yeah.

00:08:34 Speaker 1

And I guess my other question is this is something I had heard, but I don't know exactly too much about and you might be able to shed some insight on it when you were speaking about the ticks and their feeding and how it's like a chewing kind of process. I had heard that some aspect of the saliva of ticks is in some way anesthetic or distracts from the possible disturbance that is happening at that contact point. Is that true? I guess, do you know anything about that? Yeah.

00:08:59 Speaker 2

Yep, there is truth to that. So, because they're going to be latched on and they literally glue themselves on to their host, they do have to sort of numb the area. So, they have anesthetics. They also have probably some interestingly antimicrobial properties that keep that bite from getting infected, although they infect it with their own things.

00:09:17 Speaker 1

Really?

00:09:21 Speaker 2

But an interesting thing about that saliva or about the stuff that they're spitting, some people actually develop allergies, and we could talk about- there's a range of different allergies, some of them quite severe, but some people develop allergies. I actually have an allergy to ticks, so I feel ticks walking on me almost from the instant they get on my skin. So we were out standing the other day, we're standing in the field, we're doing some field work and I felt the tick crawling the back of my leg and was able to pull it off. So that is a response to some of the things that are elicited by these ticks.

00:09:54 Speaker 1

Yeah, I bet that's probably pretty useful in your line of work, huh? To have that? I guess not Spider sense, I guess Tick sense, right?

 00:10:02 Speaker 2

Yeah, of all the superpowers I could have, I guess it's not a bad one.

00:10:06 Speaker 1

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I have some, some follow up questions with those allergies too. So, we can stay tuned on that. But I guess leading into this year and how anything might be different, what is different about tick population, the tick seasons this year, or I guess over the course of maybe the past couple of years? Is there any major difference in activity that you've been noticing, or you can speak to?

00:10:32 Speaker 2

Yeah. So, I've been doing this for 30 years and every year in the spring, usually I get calls from newspapers and TV folks and they're saying, oh, is it a big tick year or is it a small tick year? Yeah. And what I always tell people is it's always a tick year. So don't think of it as don't think of it as there's more ticks than there was here, or less ticks. And there's just, there's a lot of ticks.

00:10:46 Speaker 1

OK.

00:10:53 Speaker 2

What really makes a difference is the timing and when the ticks are active, and it will differ a little bit from region to region. So here in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, we see ticks that are active starting in about late April through the end of May, we see nymphal ticks. Sorry we adult ticks and then starting late, May into July. Late July, we see nymphal ticks and then we see another adult activity period in the fall starting around mid-October through the through the other, all the months that I didn't mention are sort of low density. Here in New England, as you go further north, I know that that season has moved back a little bit in the same way as gardening. Like I was just on the phone this morning with a friend who's gardening in Maryland. They're like six weeks ahead of us in terms of the tomatoes that we have. Yeah, the same thing, these kinds of biological things Maine tends to be a little bit behind this or ahead of how you ever want to say it, their season is a little bit late.

00:11:50 Speaker 2

And I suspect, although I haven't done much work in upstate New York, ironically, that it's in the North Country, that it's a little bit later. And so, it's not that there's a big season and it's a small season. What does change from year-to-year Tadd is that the range of these ticks are expanding.  Very close to the house that you grew up in Watertown, NY, and there were no ticks when you were a kid, when you guys first went to Watertown, there were very few ticks there. So, what's changing is the range is expanding. So they're going further north into Quebec, Ontario, further north into northern Maine, they're throughout New England now, and that's a fundamental change that we've seen year to year.

00:12:35 Speaker 1

Yes, definitely. That also reminds me, one thing I did forget to introduce is your connection to the North Country, your Childhood, your education. Would you like to speak about that at all? Your background here? Yeah.

00:12:47 Speaker 2

My dad and myself and you grew up in an area the size of a football field basically. So yeah, I have a very strong connection to Watertown. I was a student at Saint Lawrence and learned much of what I knew about biology there under the guidance of a great professor there named Ken Kroll.

00:12:50 Speaker 1

Yes.

00:13:09 Speaker 2

And Doc Green has since passed, and Carl McKnight, who's still there as a biology professor, and Bruce Kahn. And yeah, I have a strong connection and love for the for the North Country.

00:13:19 Speaker 1

Yeah, I just thought our listeners at home might want to know that you are, you know, a local, you know the location.  So, if these tick seasons are getting bigger and bigger, is that how you would describe it, it's a big tick season every year as you said.

00:13:42 Speaker 2

Yeah, it's constant. And what's changing is the range is expanding. So, where we didn't have ticks a few years ago, now we have ticks and Canton and they keep spreading further and further.

00:13:43

Yeah.

00:13:53 Speaker 1

OK, so this question actually comes from my boss Dan. He was saying this to me this morning as a question he might have. So, what is, I guess, the upper limit, the barrier, the ceiling, I guess for the spread or increase in the population of ticks? Any predators, or competition, or disease or anything that I guess might stifle that populational growth or expansion?

00:14:20 Speaker 2

Not that we have seen as of yet. There seems to be none really. So, it's a very good question. So, if we ask the related question, why all this expansion, why was there something that why is there something there in great abundance that wasn't there 10 years ago? Yeah. And the answer is its white-tailed deer. So the proliferation of white tailed, if you look at the population of white-tailed deer at the turn of the 19th and the 20th century deer were very, very rare and if you watch, it's a trajectory just like up and up and up that the increase and the density of white-tailed deer throughout the northeastern United States has created fertile ground for these ticks to breed because ticks, the black legged ticks, in particular the ones that transmit Lyme disease, will only breed on a white-tailed deer. And so as soon as there was a deer everywhere, they suddenly had, you know, fertile ground for them to sort of to take hold. And with everything we've seen; it doesn't seem like there's natural predators because they've sort of expanded in their ranges to where they didn't occur before. There are some things called parasitoids. There's a wasp that will lay her leg, her egg into the into the ticks and kill them that way. But they have a very small effect on the population. There are also fungi that will kill ticks. In fact, our lab is working on some entomopathogenic fungi which will kill ticks, but again, the naturally occurring fungi don't seem to be able to keep abreast with the 3000 eggs per individual. The one thing I will say is there's an interesting phenomenon in another part of your state which is Long Island, where they've had a black legged tick deer tick problem for many years, but now that tick is starting to subside and one of the reasons that subsiding is they're being replaced by a different tick. The Lone Star tick. 

00:16:19: Speaker 1

Oh, yes, I've heard, yeah.

00:16:21 Speaker 2

So it's possible that there's some, and I hesitate to use the word because there's still some science has to be done, but it's possible that there's some kind of competition between those tick species, so that one might be excluding the other in a in a in a way that we haven't figured.

00:16:37 Speaker 1

OK. Yeah, well, that segue’s really well into my next question that I wanted to ask, what kind of different tick species are we finding here? And I guess with those expanding ranges, I guess, are there any new species that have been expanding into New York State or any competition that has not been foreseen, anything you can speak to on that?

00:16:54 Speaker 2

Yeah. So New York State is a big state as you know. So in the part of the state, so that's taking place in like Long Island, they're actually three species of human biting tick that you can encounter there. One is the black legged tick that I've been mostly talking about, although I probably didn't mention them by name enough. Those are the ones that transmit Lyme disease. About 50% of the adults are infected with Lyme. The second species that bites humans is called the dog tick. So they are called dog ticks. They don't feed exclusively dogs, but they will also feed on people. And then the third is the Lone Star tick, which is this new one that's come from Lone Star people. Think of Texas. It's not Texas. It's that Lone Star refers to a little, you know, birthmark on the back of it that looks like a star from the South Virginia, North Carolina. They moved upwards into the southern New England.

00:17:37 Speaker 1

OK.

00:17:43 Speaker 2

And they're human biting ticks. So those are three species of human biting tick that you encounter in Southern New York State. There's also a species that people have been very, very interested in called the Longhorn tick, which is a new invader to North America, came from New Zealand, probably imported with livestock. And it doesn't feed on people, yet it does feed on white-tailed deer, but it's a very curious tick and that well, first of all, it comes from another continent. And then it's invaded here and it's now, I think in 15 different States and there are literally millions and millions of these ticks now in North America and what's curious is we've yet to find a single male tick.

00:18:28 Speaker 1

Really, that's quite bizarre.

00:18:31 Speaker 2

Yeah. So, it's parthenogenic. So, it means it can be the females can breed without reproducing with a male. So those are the four species that they worry about in southern New York, only two of those as of this date to mine record only two of those are things that you would encounter in the North Country. That's the black legged ticks that transmit Lyme disease and deer ticks. We don't think there's an abundance of Lone Star ticks, although it would not surprise me to see them moving up the Saint Lawrence River Valley, they are moving up the River Valley and it's probably a matter of time until they start to proliferate throughout the state as well.

00:19:06 Speaker 1

OK. Well, on the topic of Lone Star ticks, I have a question kind of following up on that, that I something I've also heard that I'd like to I guess, verify from you about some allergies you can develop as results of getting bitten by a certain species of tick. I believe it was the Lone Star tick. Can you speak to any of that?

00:19:24 Speaker 1

Yeah. I can so we work with Doctor Scott Commons, who is the one of the docs in North Carolina that discovered this phenomenon. So, it's a very weird thing, so most of the concern that people have about ticks and tick bites is that ticks transmit germs, viruses, bacteria, parasites that come out of the tick and then cause disease in us. But there is one other way that people can get sick, and it's through the method that you say called something called a red meat allergy, actually, the official term port is Alpha gal syndrome. So Alpha Gal is a sugar that's present in red meat of all species with the exception of primates. So not monkeys and humans. What happens is something about the tick bite makes people that get bitten by that tick develop antibodies against alpha gal and particular kinds of antibodies, they're called IgE antibodies, which are the antibodies that lead to allergic reactions. And so the next time that person that has developed these IgE antibodies in response to the tick bite, the next time they eat a cheeseburger, they have an allergic action to that to that, and there's degrees, there's different degrees of the Alpha Gal syndrome. Some people have just what I described. You eat a cheeseburger and you get an upset stomach because you've got those antibodies. In other cases, it's like you have anaphylaxis, you have an anaphylactic shock. And so it can be a real life threatening allergic response.

00:20:53

Wow.

00:20:58 Speaker 2

It's not totally understood what you know ,the nature of that, of that allergy like is the allergy and response to a protein that's produced or excuse me, a molecule that's produced by the by the tick itself, or is it something that's in the maybe associated with bacteria that are in the tick? Or is it you know, or not? Or is it perhaps part of a remnant blood meal that the tick fed last time on a white tail? But it questions are still somewhat open about that, but it's pretty clearly a major concern and it's a whole other game because it's not an infectious world, it's the allergy world, which is a different, different beast altogether.

00:21:39 Speaker 1

Yeah, and is developing this, this, this allergy rare in people who have received bites from from these ticks or is it frequent? Well, how would you speak to that on?

00:21:52 Speaker 2

It's not 100%, I'll put it that way. So not everyone that gets these ticks gets the allergy. It does seem like it's more prevalent than people have thought. So last year the CDC did a couple of studies where they found that two important findings, one was that docs didn't know about alpha, so physicians, providers, healthcare providers didn't know about this thing, this phenomenon. And so it probably was not getting diagnosed for that reason.

00:22:18 Speaker 2

And secondly that when they looked at sort of a region wide, they called a sero survey where they look at serological, they look at antibodies and people, they found that this.

00:22:28 Speaker 2

There were people with the antibodies consistent with Alpha Gal syndrome throughout the Northeast and much more widespread than we first would have expected. So not everybody gets it, but there may be more people getting it, not remembering a tick bite and not necessarily making that connection between the tick bite and some food allergy that they're now having.

00:22:50 Speaker 1

OK. Yeah, that's, well, it's very good to know I guess. I guess a few more questions just for I guess people who are looking to avoid getting bitten by ticks or I guess any risk prevention they can do. So what are some preventative measures for people who want to be getting outdoors this summer, but also, you know, want to make sure they're staying safe from any of the infections they could be risked with?

00:23:14 Speaker 2

Yeah, the good news is there's things that you can do to greatly reduce your risk and they're pretty easy things. You know the analogy I use, Tadd, is I know you're a Foodie and you like to cook? So do I. So, you've heard people, like  your mom, that don't know how to cook. Uh, shouldn't say that on there. Some people say, you know, I don't know how to boil water. Well, nobody really knows how to boil water, right? What you know, is how to put water in a pan and put it on the stove, right. That's how you cook. So, the same thing for people who say, I don't know how to keep myself safe from ticks.

00:23:40 Speaker 1

Yeah, yeah.

00:23:45 Speaker 2

Well, what you need to know is that you do the same thing that you're doing elsewhere, like think about how you keep yourself safe from getting sunburned, right? You have to put things on your skin or how you keep yourself safe from mosquito bites. There are steps you can take. There are steps that you can take that greatly reduce your exposure to ticks. So those steps are first, wear appropriate clothing. So what we tell people usually, if you're going to be out hiking in an area where there's ticks, which often you'll see trail signs by our center or other centers that have sort of. Then think about wearing long pants, and although it's a bit funny looking, think about tucking your pant leg into your socks and the reason for that is  ticks almost always get on at the ground level onto you. So we say ticks don't fly, they don't jump, they don't fall from trees. Most of them start on the ground and the reason they end up on the head is that they've crawled all the way up from your foot. So if you tuck your pant leg into your socks, they'll crawl up on the outside of your pant leg instead of the inside of your pant leg. And that means that there's a chance that they'll get brushed off before they get too high. Or maybe that you'll see them before they get too hot. So rather than have them come on the inside of your pant leg, try to force them on the outside of your clothing. That's just a very simple thing that you can do.

00:25:10 Speaker 2

The next and the most helpful and the most recommended thing that everybody should do, is consider using.

00:25:20 Speaker 2

Permethrin treated clothing so there are a pesticides, things that are deadly to ticks 2000 times more deadly to ticks than they are to us. You can treat your clothing with them and then when the ticks get on your clothing, they absorb the poison through their feet and then they die and I say  the point of making that there are 2000 times more deadly to ticks than us because many people are concerned. To me, the safety profiles are very, very high. That very, very good. That is that these things generally poor, you know, maybe for infants it's not a recommended thing, but for children and Elderly, it's the best way to keep ticks off you, and there's a range of different ways you can do it. There are, you know, companies sell clothing that are insect that have insect propellant in them, or you can go to the hardware store and you can buy the tick repellents. You can just ask the hardware store. I always tell people wherever you buy ammunition, you can buy it. Permethrin you go in, you can treat your favorite hiking pants and shirts and stuff. Don't forget your socks and your shoes as well.

00:26:29 Speaker 2

So those two things can work very effectively and then the 3rd way is you can use repellents, products like DEET or picaridin that you spray directly on yourself. They will keep ticks from biting the portion of your skin that's been treated, but the problem is they don't repel on skin that's not been treated. So if you spray part of your arm and not another, it's problematic and the 2nd is that they need to be reapplied probably every four hours or so. Everything else that people use, all these things that smell nice, or maybe they're natural oils. Some of them smell nicer, or we think they're nicer because they're natural. The evidence is that most of those things are not effective against ticks. In fact, most of them are not effective against mosquitoes either. So yeah, use a repellent that has DEET or picaridin.

00:27:26 Speaker 2

Which are the recommended things? Deet, talk about safety profiles, that was developed in World War 2 and people have been using it for, you know, 75-80 years with great outcomes and very, very little health consequences. So those two things, those three things rather, are three things that people can do to keep ticks off them. And if they fail there, if they, if they don't do those things, if those things ticks get by those things, then just do a tick check every night. So every night before you go to bed after being out in the garden or working in the field, or working, or hiking on a trail. Check your body for ticks and check the body. I always say check the parts of your body where your body is a Y, so like under your arms and your groin and you know around the back of your neck and find the ticks and pull them off. And if you pull them off within you know, a short period of time that they've been attached, you can greatly reduce the risk associated with that tick bite.

00:28:23 Speaker 1

OK. Yeah. Thank you.

00:28:25 Speaker 1

I guess one more question following up on that, I'm running out of time here in the room, but I guess to anyone who is bitten by a tick, what is their course of action following that? What would you recommend?

00:28:38 Speaker 2

So that's a great question too, because there are some fallacies around tick removal because the optic is get that tick off your body as quickly as possible, and the fallacies are of a couple of different flavors, but they all revolve around the notion that that you can, if you don't pull the tick off properly you may increase the risk. None of that is true, OK?  So one of the myths is that if you grab the tick and you squeeze it, you're going to squeeze the contents of that tick into the bite. So it's squeezing stuff into you. That's not the way ticks work. Ticks can't, for example, ticks can't regurgitate, they can't vomit. They can't because they have pharyngeal blocks that prevent that from happening. So if you squeeze a tick body, what's going to happen is it's going to burst and then maybe the, you know, the blood or whatever it's imbibed will go onto your skin and then you just wash that off, but you're not going to squeeze it back into you the way you squeeze into it. The other notion is that if you don't have the right removal tool, which the right removal tool is generally a pair of fine forceps, there's a company called bug bite thing that makes a very nice forcep that's has some very fine point, but you don't necessarily need anything particular, just something that allows you to grip the tick very close to where it's attached to the skin and then pull it off and the myth that's associated with that process is people say, well, if I miss part of the tick if part of the head sticks in, it could cause disease. Here's why that's a myth. First of all, ticks don't have heads. Ticks aren't insects. They have mouth parts, but they don't have  their own heads. The mouth parts can remain, but back behind, but they don't pose any risk because that tick is no longer live or a live tick is no longer connected with those mouth parts, so germs aren't going to go through those mouth parts into you. Now that could cause infection because just if you as if you had a sliver of wood there, you could be exposed to infection. So after you remove the tick, if there's some tiny portion leftover, then just treat it with a topical antibiotic. You know, wash it with iodine or, you know, a topical antibiotic and just clean the area. Well, like you would any other exposed cut that you get in the woods, those things can drastically increase the probability that you have a happy outcome from a tick exposure.

00:31:11 Speaker 1

OK. Yeah. Thank you very much.

00:31:13

Sure.

00:31:14 Speaker 1

Is there anything else you'd like to say? I guess to the viewers before we call it about take season 2024.

00:31:21 Speaker 2

No. I guess the last thing I'll say is just on, I'll add as a point of reference that if you take a tick off and you have questions about the tick, you can look online and you can find different services that will test the tick for their state agencies and private agencies that will test the tick for pathogens and then you. What's helpful for that is that first of all, it can put your your mind at ease about what that exposure meant or in some cases it might make you concerned. But then the concern is  you can put a name to because the laboratories will tell you this tick is infected with and then they use the fancy Latin name like anaplasma phagocytosis, which you can then take your doctor and then your doctor can test you because the test when you test the  doesn't test you, but they can test you and see if what was it got transmitted to you.

00:32:13 Speaker 1

Thank you so much for listening to our ticks season 2024 interview. I hope that the interview is able to provide some answers, and if you still have questions, feel free to talk with one of us at one of our events. Thank you so much again for listening and I hope you enjoyed see you next time.