"That will cause the tick to spew all of its stomach contents into the skin, and you'll be more likely acquire whatever infection that tick was carrying."Īlso, don't put Vaseline or smoke from a cigarette or match on it," Fallon says. "What you don't want to do is squeeze the body of the tick," he says. "Very carefully, go under the head of the tick with the tweezers and just pull out the mouth of the tick, which is embedded in the skin," Fallon says. Brian Fallon, who directs the Lyme and Tick-Borne Diseases Research at Columbia University Medical Center.Ģ. So if you live in places with Lyme, she recommends checking your body for ticks every day. "People may be putting themselves at risk every day without knowing it." Here are some tick bite-avoidance tips.) On the East Coast, most people catch Lyme right around their homes, Kugeler says, not just when they're hiking or camping. "That's the scalp, behind the ears, the armpits and in the groin area," she says. And they like to hang out in the nooks and crannies of the human body. Lyme disease - which causes flu-like symptoms and arthritis - is spread by blacklegged ticks.
#CAN YOU SQUISH A TICK TO DEATH SERIES#
(Our global health team is reporting on the anticipated surge in Lyme disease as part of its series on future pandemics.) "And today, we think that the true burden of Lyme disease in the U.S. "Reported cases of Lyme have tripled in the past few decades," she says. In other parts of the New England and the upper Midwest, Lyme continues to spread, says epidemiologist Kiersten Kugeler at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He's not exactly sure which parts of the Northeast will be most affected, but if recent history repeats itself, the risk will be high in New York state and Connecticut, he says, and possibly patches of the mid-Atlantic region. For more on that, check out the piece in our sister blog, Goats and Soda. Ostfeld has been studying the debilitating tick-borne disease for more than 20 years, and has developed an early warning system based on mice. "We're anticipating 2017 to be a particularly risky year for Lyme," says Rick Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. This spring and summer may be a doozy for Lyme disease, at least in parts of the Northeast.
The culprit: Lyme disease is caused by the bite of a blacklegged tick.
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