To help you enjoy your outdoor time this summer, we’ve compiled evidence-based ideas for preventing tick bites and the diseases they carry. Please forward this to friends and family because prevention saves lives!

Tick-repellant sprays & clothing

For some well-researched advice on protecting you and your family from tick bites, visit this webpage published by LymeTV, a nonprofit based in Maine. Their recommendations cover bug repellents, pretreated tick-repelling garments, tick checks, protecting your property, and more. For advice geared to safe doses of repellents for children, visit the American Academy of Pediatrics website.

Free educational resources for preventing tick bites at camps and schools

Children are at the greatest risk for contracting Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases, with the highest incidence occurring between ages five through nine. A free Tick JEDI Health Education Program from LymeTV teaches kids how to avoid and check for ticks through fun, educational cartoons, created by Disney Channel & Disney/ABC writers. School and camp administrators can supplement this information with workbooks, lesson plans, classroom posters, parent brochures, and online presentations. Many of these materials are available in both English and Spanish.

LymeTV is a volunteer-based 501(c)(3) registered non-profit organization dedicated to educating the global community about Lyme disease and other dangerous tick-borne infectious diseases. Invisible International is a cosponsor of this project, developed during our 2020 Hackathon, which was focused on education and awareness around tick-borne illness. Our Hackathons are supported through generous donations from the Lovell Family Foundation.

A fun dance that motivates kids to check for ticks

To encourage kids to do more and better tick checks, comedic songwriters “Louis and Dan and the Invisible Band” created a catchy song-and-dance routine to help kids remember to check for creepy-crawly ticks in their favorite hiding places. It makes tick checks fun and easy, potentially reducing the incidence of dangerous tick-borne diseases in kids.

Sponsors of this project, PA Lyme Resource Network and Invisible International, also organized an educational campaign around the dance called the #TickCheckChallenge. To help spread the word about the importance of tick checks, we’re encouraging people to record their own TikTok-style interpretations of the dance, then share them on social media, following the instructions at https://palyme.org/tick-check-challenge/

This project was developed for the Invisible International 2020 Hackathon, which was focused on creating education and awareness around tick-borne illness. It was supported through generous donations from the Lovell Family Foundation.

Tick risks in your area and how to remove ticks

TickEncounter, run by the University of Rhode Island, publishes an interactive map that lets you learn more about the ticks in your area and the diseases that they carry. Their website also includes prevention strategies, tick species identification guides, and educational videos. Watch their animation on how to safely remove a tick here and how to remove swarming larval ticks from you and your dog with duct tape here.

Where to test those ticks

When you pull an engorged tick off yourself or a loved one, consider sending it to a tick testing lab. The benefits are three-fold. 

1. Tick labs can identify disease-causing microbes inside ticks within a few days after a bite. Because human Lyme disease tests aren’t reliable in the first month after a bite, this is a way to more quickly assess the risk that you may have been infected. 

2. Tick labs can scan for multiple tick-borne pathogens in one pass, saving time and money. The tick may not have had time to transmit these microbes into your body, but this information will help your health-care provider develop a strategy for diagnosis and treatment.

3. Sharing the tick data with research labs can help researchers and public health officials more accurately track the spread of ticks and the disease-causing microbes that they carry.

Here’s a list of public tick-testing labs that conduct free or low-cost tick screening:

MilTICK (Free for all military families)

Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station (Free for CT residents)

New Jersey Ticks 4 Science, Rutgers Univ. (Free for NJ residents)

Tick Research Lab of Pennsylvania (Basic screening free for PA residents)

Connecticut Veterinary Medical Diagnostic Laboratory, UConn

University of Maine Tick Testing 

These commercial tick-testing labs share tick data with non-profit and academic research organizations:

Ticknology 

TickReport 

Tick Check, East Stroudsburg University 

ECO Laboratory 

Why tick-borne diseases are on the rise in the U.S.

It’s not your imagination—the tick problem is getting worse—and one of the best explainers of why this is happening was written by science writer Ula Chrobak in Knowable Magazine last year. 

She writes that Lyme disease, which is caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, has increased threefold in the U.S. since the late 1990s and, cases in Ontario were three times higher in 2017 compared to the five-year average from 2012 and 2016.

Through extensive interviews with disease ecologists Daniel Salkeld and Richard Ostfeld, CDC biologist Rebecca Eisen, and ecologist Lucy Gilbert, Chrobak summarizes the main drivers as:

• Increasing temperatures that allow tick life cycles and reproductive rates to speed up, sometimes shortening a three-year life cycle to two years. (Eisen)

• Forest fragmentation caused by human development has driven out natural predators, reducing ecosystem diversity and increasing in tick populations. (Ostfeld)

• A rapid spread of aggressive, nonnative Lone star ticks, which are creeping northwards into Maine and Canada. This tick species can transmit diseases like ehrlichiosis, deadly Heartland and Bourbon viral diseases, the Lyme-like southern tick-associated rash illness (STARI), tularemia, and alpha gal red meat allergy. (CDC)

Medical education: The epidemiology of Lyme disease

This continuing medical education course discusses the purpose and limitations of the Lyme disease surveillance case definition posted on the CDC website, and why it shouldn’t be used as the sole basis for a clinical diagnosis. It’s taught by Elizabeth Maloney, MD, Education Co-director at Invisible, a Minnesota family physician, and the founder/president of Partnership for Tickborne Diseases Education, a non-profit providing evidence-based education on tick-borne diseases.

The Invisible Education Initiative, funded by the Montecalvo Foundation, provides free, accredited Continuing Medical Education (CME) courses that focus on vector-borne and environmental illness within a One Health framework. These courses are available to clinicians and the public. To donate to this initiative and to learn about Invisible International, please go here http://invisible.international/give.

NOTE: These are prevention tips, not medical advice. Invisible International does not endorse any particular brand, product, testing site, or commercial entity.