Ticks, Mites and Mysterious Lone Star Illnesses

Ticks are, in the words of Pliny the Elder, 'the foulest and nastiest creature that be.' If these blood sucking arachnids and their mite brethren weren’t horrible enough, they’re second only to the mosquito in the risk of blood borne human pathogens. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss ticks, chiggers and the mysterious illnesses associated with the lone star tick -- one of which generates a meat allergy in the host.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
And Robert. You know well that on this show we
do our best not to demonize any inhabitant of the
animal kingdom. But I've got to ask your opinion on

(00:27):
one specific branch that is maybe maybe the most twisted
branch in existence. How do you feel about ticks? Uh?
Ticks are awful? Yes, Ticks. Ticks and mosquitoes are the
only specific animals that I tell my five year old
that it's it's okay to to hate on, to to
actively kill or be killed with. I'm hoping later in

(00:50):
this episode we can do a little guided meditation to
take anybody out there who's got hatred of spiders, fear
or hatred for for your little uh, for the good arachnids,
and to move that over onto the only animals that
really might deserve it, which are ticks. Yeah. I agree,
And for instance, I look back on my own life

(01:11):
and having like a revulsion at times too slugs garden slugs,
which is completely ridiculous given that garden slugs yes, are gross,
but pretty harmless. They're No, you're not gonna get hurt
by a garden slug. I mean unless you you know,
you're freaked out and your trip over something, etcetera, and
there you know there's some sort of crazy scenario that

(01:31):
you build up that enables the slug to kill you.
For the most part, slug doesn't care about you, and
it's not gonna hurt you. But but but mosquitoes, other
parasites such as ticks, these are these are major threats.
They are actively hunting us. They're actively trying to feed
on our blood and in doing so, putting us at

(01:53):
risk for a whole host of terrifying diseases. Now, yet again,
I know we're gonna hear from some tick lovers there.
Maybe you're a I doubt you're Maybe you're a tick
scientist and you're saying, hey, I study these things for
a living. You know you got to give them a
fair shake. Okay, okay, I want to give them as
fair as shake as I can. They are animals. They
exist in an ecology and a web of life, like

(02:15):
all animals. We try not to demonize anything here. I'm
just saying, if you have to demonize something. If you've
got that hate in your heart, the ticks are a
good place to put it. Yes, now, I will definitely
say that ticks are fascinating. I mean, we're doing the
whole episode here about ticks and tickborn illness, so yes,
it's a wonderful topic. They're fascinating organisms. Uh maybe even

(02:39):
a perfect organism. And I'll also say that, uh that
certainly we see cases where organisms like ticks and mosquitoes
their their their nuisance factor can be intensified by by
by what humans have done to the environment, putting things
out of balance, making things, introducing the threat into new areas,

(03:02):
and making the threat greater than it would normally be.
It's like taking a normally rowdy and annoying child and
giving that child a super soaker full of urine. But
but I still have to come back to the fact
that having grown up in in tick haunted wildernesses uh,
I mean, namely Tennessee, I associate ticks and also chiggers,

(03:27):
which are a type of MT closely related to ticks,
as we'll discuss. I associate these creatures with just a
dread of the outdoors. These are creatures that make going
out outside and enjoying nature difficult. Yeah. I love hiking
around in the woods, but whenever I mostly do it
by putting ticks out of my mind. And when they

(03:48):
come into my mind, that normally nice feeling of brushing
through the leaves, of feeling them rub across your skin
as you move through the trees, it turns into a
creepy nightmare tickle of disease. And hey, eight yeah like it.
It's really has has gotten to the point. Lucky, luckily,
I have never experienced, to my knowledge, any tick or

(04:09):
ugger born illnesses, or or mosquito born illnesses, you know,
knock on wood. But I now when I drive, especially
in the height of summer, when I drive, you know,
on the interstate, and I'm going through a portion of
say North Georgia or a portion of Tennessee, and I
look out into the into the wilderness, I just think
of all the parasites. I think that those those are

(04:30):
just tick and chigger haunted woods, just waiting to eat
me alive. Okay, So today we're gonna be talking about
ticks in biology, ticks in history, some zoonotic diseases, some
particularly interesting diseases and syndromes, that have been associated with
the lone star tick recently. And then I think we're

(04:51):
also going to end with a few practical tips on
what to do to protect yourself from the tick menace.
But first you had some notes about how a hatred
is not a recent phenomenon, right, Oh no, Um, ticks
and sugars are are worldwide creatures. Uh. Ticks and mites
as well discussed there are a lot of them, They're everywhere,

(05:11):
and annoyance hatred of them goes back quite a long ways.
In fact, we have writings about ticks from first century
Roman author and natural philosopher Plenty of the Elder. Yeah,
he probably familiar with Plenty. He described many a strange
and bizarre creature in his book The Natural History Now

(05:31):
full of many hilarious and accuracies. Yes, many many, uh
and and and some of them were pretty fabulous, right,
he talked about it was sometimes it was just a
weird echo of natural world creatures from a distant land.
You know, they were exaggerated through second and third hand accounts.
But he also talked about monstrous humanoid races like the

(05:54):
mouthless hairy humanoid as stoney and the belly mouth to blemmyes.
They were always one of my favorite. You know, they
have no head, but they have a face and on
their chest and a mouth where their belly is. Now,
you just gotta wonder did people read that in first
century Rome and say, yeah, yeah, that's true, or did
they back then read that and say, I don't know

(06:16):
about this. Well, I mean it's very similar to the
sea monsters, right. I mean again, you're you're not dealing
with with firsthand account. Someone like Plenty is not necessarily
going out and exploring the world and taking notes. I
just feel like I have a hard time modeling the
appropriate level of skepticism to pretend to be someone of

(06:37):
the ancient world. Yeah, well this would this would actually
be an interesting one to to discuss the nature of
exotic beasts represented in natural tones and to what extent
people back home took them seriously. Now, of course, he
couldn't have dreamed up anything as exotic as the real
arachnids of the animal kingdom, right, that's right. And he

(06:58):
really hated ticks. He called them quote the foulest and
nastiest creatures that be And uh, I had actually looked
up a passage from the Natural History and of course,
bear in mind that the scientific information here is quite outdated,
but the human disdain for ticks is not. He says,
there is an animal also that is generated in the summer,

(07:20):
which has its head always buried deep in the skill
of a beast, and so living on its blood, swells
to a large size. This is the only living creature
that has no outlet for its food. Hence, when it
has overgorged itself, it bursts asunder, and thus it's very
element has made the cause of its death. That is great,

(07:43):
He's saying. Picks can't poop, and they drink so much
of your blood, and they're so greedy that they just
explode and die. Yeah, they're like just a lesson in gluttony,
which h yeah, I mean when you think of the tick,
that's what you think of this thing. But it is
just engaging itself on your blood or the blood of
sable love pet to the point where they're just bags

(08:05):
of blood. Well, I guess we should look at the
real science of ticks, right yea, So we'll put aside
we're not gonna use plenty as a primate source on this, okay,
So what we'll we'll table that for now come back
to whether they just drink blood until they explode because
they can't poop. So ticks are what are they? They
are not insects. They are arachnids in the same class

(08:27):
as spiders and scorpions. Yeah, and as far as arachnids go,
the subclass akari is where all the real arachnid diversity is.
So in our previous episode on spiders, we mentioned forty
five thousand species of spiders, that being the about the
most recent count. But there are an estimated fifty thousand

(08:47):
species of mites. That's another kind of arachne right closely
related to ticks, and we'll get into those in a bit.
And then they are upwards of nine different ticks. A
good four variety of those mites, by the way, just
live in house dust. They they kind of live in everything,
living everywhere. And uh yeah, the ticks and mites both
benefit from worldwide distribution. Wow, So if you scoop up

(09:10):
some dust bunnies from your floor, you're likely to have
some great diversity of mites in your hands. Cool. Now, Okay,
ticks are of course obligate thematophagus ectoparasites of terrestrial vertebrates
now that that's a mouthful, let's break it down there.
Ectoparasites meaning they're parasitic organisms that work from the outside.

(09:31):
Unlike some other things. They don't try to get inside you.
They're happy to work through your skin. Their prey is
terrestrial vertebrates. This means land dwelling animals with backmones like mammals, birds,
and reptiles. They're obligate hematophages mean meaning that they live
by drinking blood and this is their determined survival niche.

(09:52):
So blood sucking isn't just an option for ticks. It's
not one tool in their survival toolkit. It's blood or bus.
This is how they have to survive. So there are
two primary superfamilies of ticks. There's the hard ticks, which
are exodoidea and uh, those are usually going to be
larger and they've got a harder exoskeleton, the outer the

(10:13):
outer shell. And then they're the argosoidea, which are the
soft ticks. Those are usually smaller and they've got a
softer body. Yeah, so the hard ticks generally we're talking
three point six to twelve point seven millimeters in size.
Soft ticks one point seven to six point one millimeters
in size, but both varieties can reach twenty to thirty

(10:34):
millimeters when they're fully engorged on precious blood, until they
just make themselves explode as they can't poop. Well, I
I guess this um. This observation comes from the fact
that they do become so in gorge that they are
easily popped in the fingers between the fingers if you're
say pulling one off of a dog, which you don't

(10:55):
want to do. By the way, this is something I
learned when I was a kid. I saw adults taking
ticks off of pets and off of people, and they
would intentionally crush them between their fingernails or crush them
with their fingers when they could while they were pulling
them off. We'll get into the full range of tick
tips later, but you don't want to do that. Ideally,
you want to remove the tick without rupturing its body.

(11:18):
Here's a question. Now we know it goes back to
plenty of the elder, but how much further back does
tick hate go? How long have other larger animals been
hating ticks? You can, I think safely say that dinosaurs
hated ticks because the fossil record indicates that ticks probably
first arose in the Cretaceous period between sixty and a
hundred and forty six million years ago. Well, I mean

(11:39):
there's a lot of vertebrate diversity during this time. This
was just a buffet, right, a lot of stuff to suck.
So uh, I looked into the history a little bit
about this. That there's a wonderful book that I've referenced
on the podcast before titled Dark Banquet Blood and the
Curious Lives of Blood Feeding Creatures by Bill Shoot. I
highly recommend it. He has a he talks a lot

(12:00):
about bats and a lot of and also about other
blood drinking organisms. So of course he talks about ticks
and he talks a little bit about their evolution. So
tick ancestors were likely mights. Again I mentioned it might
are very closely related to ticks, okay, and they evolved.
These might evolved to become obligate to sango var's obligate

(12:22):
blood drinkers like we've been discussing, um but but but
the difference here is that might are not obligates okay, like,
for instance, the modern and definitely foul jigger or red bug.
The more technical term here is Trumpiculidae, which comes from
the Greek to tremble. So these creatures and if you've

(12:44):
if you've ever had to deal with these, these are
are just horrific creatures to have to to to live
in the same environment with. I've hated them indirectly and
that they have assaulted beloved members of my family, including
my wife before. But you never wanted to go out
of the fields and strangle the little things myself. No,
I don't think I've ever maybe when I was a kid,

(13:07):
I don't remember ever having a big chigger attack. But
they they they've gotten all up on the legs of
people I have known in love. I just remember them
being a huge problem when I would go to Scout
camps as a kid, and uh and and they seem
to just be particularly bad in areas that I continue
to visit, like as some friends who live in the
North Georgia Mountains they have a bad ugger problem. And

(13:29):
then my my mom's house the area surrounding it has
has quite a schigger problem as well. So the interesting
thing though about these chiggers, which are mites. Again, they
only feed on blood in their larval stage, so that
the larval stages when they're actually feasting on your blood
the rest of the time, and when they get become larger,
when they reach a maturity, they're living in the ground

(13:51):
feasting on arthropods and also arthropod eggs picks. On the
other hand, Uh, what what essentially happened here is that
they evolve to carry on their juvenile ways exclusively. And
this is a common route we see in evolution. Actually,
often the router species takes to become a new species

(14:12):
is carrying over some juvenile characteristics into adulthood. Yeah, essentially
becoming like a blood sucking Peter Pan, an eternal man
baby in everything but breeding. Because that's the key thing, right,
is that if you're going to remain a juvenile blood
drink or your entire life, you also need to be
able to reproduce as an adult. So how does that happen? Well,

(14:35):
according to Shoot, what occurs here is quote a change
in the timing of genetically programmed events, a process known
as heterochroni. So it might somehow maintain its larval feeding
behavior into adulthood. And and we actually have a few
examples of this that we can look to in the
contemporary world. The most well known process. For this is

(14:58):
a neotony by which an organism reaches sexual maturity while
otherwise juvenile, and the mud puppy salamander is an example
of this. It retained its gills through adulthood instead of uh,
you know, essentially leaving them behind um in it's in
its juvenile stage right, so it would have otherwise had
like this amphibious lifestyle cycle where it was like a

(15:20):
guild underwater organism as a larva and then became this
air breathing organism as an adult. But it maintains the
gills throughout adulthood. So the examples of the tick and
the chigger are interesting to look at because you see
the divergence there. One continues to stick to a very
successful strategy of only feeding on blood when it's small,

(15:40):
when it's when it's young, whereas the tick just continues
to do it. It was so successful, so good at it,
it doesn't need to do anything else. Oh, I'm so
tempted to do that thing here that biologists hate, where
you imply that a an organism that's taken a further
evolutionary route has somehow become more advanced. Now we know
that's not the case. And I hate it when people

(16:01):
use that metaphor, but I want to say the ticks
are just more advanced micro vampires. They are. Yeah. Well,
and the the the other interesting thing. I'll get into
the details here in a bit, but the tick is
the only one that is a true vampire. The trigger,
though it is essentially feasting on your blood, it's not really,
it's doing something a bit grosser to you. Now, if

(16:24):
we want to look back at tick history itself, a
lot of what we know about ancient ticks is through
ticks we've found preserved in fossilized amber, Yes, fossilized amber,
just like in Jurassic Park. And like in Jurassic Parks,
some samples of these, amazingly have maintained some of the

(16:44):
red blood cells, the ythrocytes of the mammals that these
ticks were feeding on millions of years ago. This brings
up an amusing idea. What you have Jurassic Park. All
these kids, you know, they go to it in this
fictional scenario, and they're excited about seeing the dinosaurs, but
instead all they have are ancient mosquitoes and ticks. Just

(17:08):
you're just riding around in in a special car and
you just look out and just ancient mosquitoes flocking to
the glass trying to get in, ticks kind of raining
from the trees like uh like snow, like evil fruit
dropping from above. Yeah, and they're they're giant ticks. I'm
not saying that they're actually were giant ticks, and we

(17:30):
can believe maybe. Yeah. I mean, if we're we're doing
the Durassic Park scenario and we're we're tweaking science a
bit for blockbuster success, everyone who wants to see giant ticks,
welcome to a matto phage park. Yeah. So one interesting
study here is in April of this professor emeritus of

(17:51):
Oregon State University, George George Poynard, Jr. Published a paper
describing a really interesting fossil find. So it was a
tick of the genus Ambiloma, which is a genus that
will come up later on. And it was engorged with
blood preserved in a sample of dominican amber. Not only that,

(18:12):
but there were two holes in its dorsal exoskeleton. So
the back of the tick, it's engorged with blood and
it's been punctured. And this indicates that the tick was
probably plucked off of its host by force, so you
have to imagine this ancient scene. Probably what happened is
that this tick was a casualty of primate grooming. So
one monkey plus a tick off of another monkey somewhere

(18:37):
between fifteen and forty five million years ago, punctures that
ticks in gorged body like you're not supposed to do,
then drops it into a puddle of tree resin which
hardens and then preserves it almost perfectly. And this also
preserved something amazing mammalian red blood cells pouring out of
the punctures in the ticks back. Even more amazing. Point

(19:00):
claimed that because of the preservation quality, you can make
out the evidence of a blood parasite known as pyroplasms
that are attacking the red blood cells that the tick
drank from the monkey. So at the micro scale, this
is a really cool fossil action scene. Oh that is
and it this brings to mind two things. The first point,

(19:20):
I want to make it totally non scientific, but I
wonder if anyone has devised a monster movie in which
someone tries to clone an ancient hominid or a or
an ape from blood like this, and since it's it's
blood from inside the tick. You end up with a
tick hominid hybrid get Roger Corman on the phone, brilliant. Yeah,

(19:44):
it basically rights itself. But the other idea is, I
wonder if we do have any tick defenders out there,
if this is not an area of consideration. The role
that ticks might have had in the social evolution of
primate species is fecial humans. Yeah, I mean so, we
spent a lot of time at the beginning of this

(20:04):
episode dwelling on how easy it is to hate ticks
that might be programmed into us at a very basic level,
because it is what it may be a big part
of what gives us the social functions of our brain.
So if you look at grooming as one of the
primary social activities of primates and our brains as being,

(20:25):
according to the social brain hypothesis, primarily shaped by social relationships,
and like remembering who you've groomed, who grooms who? Uh,
the kind of power dynamics in these grooming relationships. So
you've got ticks. You've got ticks right there at the
center of what makes us who we are. Yeah. Hey,
here's a third bonus idea for any especially for startups.

(20:48):
I think tech startups stuff. What you do is you
introduce ticks into your office environment and then encourage social
grooming techniques to keep tickboard illnesses from uh, you know,
be abilitating your your workforce. I am foreseeing some hr complication.
All right, so let's let's move back to the tick

(21:10):
in my scenario for a second, because I want to
talk about their feeding practices. So, first of all, I
mentioned how ticks and mites, especially especially chiggers, and also
you could probably extend this stephen mosquitoes as well. These
are creatures that are not just mere parasites that they
hunt us. I feel like we often lose sight of that. Uh.

(21:31):
Ticks and mites use a combination of light, touch and
chemical stimuli to track you and then to spring and chickers,
especially your speed demons. So they move in, they find
the thinnest parts of your skin, such as ankles or armpits.
They crawl under any type clothing they encounter, and that's
often where they bite and then they and then when

(21:52):
once they buy, they start feeding. So what is chigger
feeding like? Oh, it's it's grotesque. It's you might expect
it to be more in line with what a tick does.
But the tick is more is really more specialized, and
what the chigger is doing is more in line with
Brundle fly. Ronin brings the fly um, so the chigger

(22:13):
attaches and then basically just shives the be Jesus out
of the target area, injecting their saliva into the wound.
Then the outer layer of the epidermis hardens into a
straw like style of stone. The saliva flows down this
tube and in the enzymes melt the surrounding tissue. And

(22:35):
this is where I want to quote quote Bill Shoot
because he puts this perfectly, says the rudest part of
the chiggers feeding gig begins as the liquefied dermal stew
is snorked up through the style of stone and into
the parasite's muscular fearings. Wow, so so it comes in
stabs you up real good, like it's like it's you know,

(22:55):
with an ice pick, breaking up some ice, and then
it puts some in zymes on you or is that right?
It does a little dissolving. Yeah, there's a Basically it
would be like imagine a dungeon and dragon scenario where
a evil goblinoid stabs you with a magical dagger that
like the wound caught arizes into a tube like a

(23:17):
grotesque infected tube, and then it uses that as a straw,
right to just to pump a bunch of dissolving saliva
into your body and then slop up the work snork
up the dermal stew afterwards. So so it's just it's
almost not fair to call it sucking because there you're
imagining a tidier process. It's more like, just go into

(23:40):
town on you, right, and while there are going to
be blood cells in that that that liquefied stew, it's
not drinking just blood, right, So well, to be fair
in some of what I've read, now, ticks are primarily
blood feeders, but they do get some other bits of
you in what they consume. Now, the immune reaction to this,

(24:00):
this awful violence against your flesh, that's what causes the
insane itching with chiggers. And it's worth noting that most
chiggers don't get to finish their human meals. They're gonna
get brushed off before they can actually fully engorge. Now
there's a whole host of so it's pointless too. Yeah,
I mean, they just cause all the suffering and they
don't even really get to finish. Yeah, yeah, they that

(24:22):
most of them don't even get to finish. Now, one
of the other things about chiggers is since they're so small,
so so difficult to observe, there there's a lot of
misinformation about out there about what they are and what
do you do about their bites. So one of the
common things I encounter is there's people that believe that
the chigger is still in the skin, that it crawls
inside you and is down there making you itch, and

(24:46):
that you therefore need to put like fingernail um uh
polish on top of it to suffocated in your skin. Yeah,
but that's complete hooeie because the the the chigger beads
and then falls away. Often most of the time incompletely
feeds and then falls away. So once you have that
bite and you're having to contend with that bite, the

(25:07):
chigger is gone. Um, You're just gonna have to deal
with the subsequent immune reaction. Right, So, how is the
tick feeding process different than the chigger process? Okay, so
the tick uh is a more advanced drinker of liquids,
So unlike the chigger, it has an actual blood snor
cole that it uses thank god, I mean, use your

(25:30):
own blood funnel, don't forge one out of my flesh
like some sort of a jerk. So it latches onto
the flesh, It scissors its way into the host skin
with its uh chillisrae, which are pincer like claws, and
it drives this this straw and this the this, this
device that's known as a hippo stone. So this in

(25:51):
this hippo stone terminates in hook like projections. It holds
it in place, so it it essentially anchors itself and
your skin with this thing. And some species of ticks
have saliva that effectively clues it in place for the
duration of its feeding. And then they breathe through openings
in their adomen during office because you know, obviously you
can't expect them to breathe through the front of their body. Terrific. Well, Robert,

(26:16):
I think maybe we should take a quick break and
when we come back, we will get back into the
history of the tick or some crazy alleged facts about
tick torture. All right, we're back, Okay, So I wanted
to explore one morbidly fascinating but I think likely dubious

(26:37):
historical claim. I came across, and that is the claim
of Central Asian tribes using tick torture on prisoners, essentially
working with the ticks, if it were true. Now I'll
get to all the qualifications on that in a minute.
So I first came across this in the Encyclopedia of
Entomology edited by John L. Capanira, and this looks to be.

(26:58):
This is a very solid, you know, respectable academic encyclopedia.
And there is an entry on the argusids or the
soft ticks by Hebrew University of Jerusalem and entomologist and
parasitologist Igor Uspinsky. And in this entry he's talking about
tick infestation of human and animal habitations, and he mentions

(27:20):
that the longer ticks go without food, the more aggressively
they attack those who come within range of them. And
then he writes, quote, in past centuries, special bug traps
full of hungry argusids were used by Central Asian rulers
for the torture of prisoners who died from exanguination, which
means bleeding to death by thousands of ticks. And I,

(27:44):
obviously you can guess why that got my attention. UH.
Couple of questions to follow up on. Is that possible
to be ex sanguineated by ticks, to be literally bled
to death by ticks? And is that historically true? So
I want to start with is it possible question? I
looked up some numbers and tried to do a little math.
Is it possible to be blood to death by ticks?

(28:06):
And how many ticks would it take? So there are
usually four stages of recognized blood loss which indicate varying
degrees of severity. You've got, you know, class one through
class four hemorrhage, and the final stage, which tends to
immediately proceed death without intervention, is the class four hemorrhage,
which happens when the body loses about forty percent of

(28:28):
its blood volume. Now, blood volume varies a lot with
body size, but if you average us all out, just
to have a typical average human adult, that that human
adult is going to have on average about five leaders
of blood or about ten point five pints. So to
bleed to death, the average person needs to lose about
of five leaders, which is two leaders of blood. That's

(28:50):
a lot of blood to lose. So how many ticks
would it take to get that amount of blood out
of you? I mean this is a This is basically
a death by a thousand cuts scenari area, right exactly.
So I tried to look up how much blood does
the average tick ingest? Again, this is going to vary
a lot by tick and by host, but let's just
try to get a ballpark guess. One study I found

(29:12):
from measured the blood meal size of four different hard ticks.
Now it's worth noting that Spinsky is alleging these are
soft ticks they are doing the sucking. But I found
this on the hard ticks. I will jump in and
in remind listeners of the earlier stat that shows that generally,
despite harder soft tick, uh, they can still bloat up

(29:33):
to around the same size. It seems so the hard
ticks are generally larger, but if they grow to about
the same size, you'd imagine their meals to be, you know,
again vastly varying across species, but having some kind of comparability. Yeah,
at least for the for the factoring of of this scenario. Right, So, uh,
I looked at it. So anyway, in the study, they
look at four different kinds of hard ticks, and you

(29:55):
get samples of averages like point eight one million leaders
per male point fifty five milli leaders, one point five
milli leaders, and point fifty one milli leaders. So I'd
say on average, we can say, just for the sake
of round numbers, the average tick meal is maybe like
one milli leader of blood. So if you take the
average tick meal is one milli leader of blood and

(30:17):
the average person needs to lose two leaders of blood
to bleed to death, you need about two thousand ticks
to lead you to death. On one hand, that's a
lot of ticks to have. On the other hand, that's
not that many ticks I mean to kill you. So
that that's my rough math. But there's still a question
of could it actually happened. Maybe something maybe that just

(30:39):
wouldn't happen in nature, like would something prevent ticks from
bleeding you to death? So I looked and tried to
find evidence in modern times of a human or other
large mammal being bled to death by ticks. I couldn't
find that. But tick infestations in the wild can reportedly
have really life threatening consequences, leading not only to disease,
but to like anemie and starvation in animals like moose,

(31:02):
and can also create what's known as the ghost moose. Yes,
this is a This is a grotesque example of the
the the sheer, ravenous hunger of the tick. So in uh,
what we're dealing with here is a cold weather tick
by the name of Dermocentaur alpha pictus, and this thrives

(31:23):
in Western Canada and it causes what's known as winter
tick disease in moose and other large ungulates. So what
happens is you'll have a moose that winds up heavily
infested by upwards of two thousand ticks, and they become
so infested by these things, so bothered by these ticks

(31:44):
that they they're grooming themselves incessantly. They're rubbing against trees
and the resulting hair loss gives them a grayish or
whitish coloration. Plus they're also emaciated from the blood loss
and exposure because all that time um rubbing against trees
and grooming themselves as time that they can't spend feeding.

(32:05):
So it's just pretty sad example. But I mean, unless
you're unless you're rooting for the ticks, and then yeah,
go ticks, because they just basically drained a moose. Well,
I mean, it makes me wonder Even though I haven't
found any cases where it's clear that a large animal
was exanguinated by ticks bled to death, I have to
imagine it may have happened at some point in history. Yeah,

(32:28):
I mean, I guess one of the problems when you're
dealing with the natural world, of course, is that if
a if a creature like a moose is sufficiently the
abilitated by its tick infestation, then it's going to potentially
fall to other predators, right right, So it's going to
kind of take care of itself. But how do you
compare that to an artificial environment where one human or

(32:51):
one group of humans is creating a tick infestation and
keeping both the individual fund from dealing with their investation
and key being other animals from taking advantage of it.
Can you imagine though, how disappointing that is for the
predator that comes in to take the Like so pack
of wolves comes up, like, hey, free moose, awesome, but

(33:12):
it's covered in ticks. Like if somebody offered you a
free steak and it's covered in ticks. Well, you know,
I guess it's kind of that's one of the downsides
to being a predator anyway, because pretty much any animal
you're going to prey upon is going to have its parasites,
and then there's a risk that those parasites are gonna
flee to you. I always think back to when I

(33:33):
was a kid. I was riding with my dad in
his truck and he struck a bobcat with the truck.
Oh you know, you know, pure accident. Uh. And then
he got the creature and it was dead, and he
put it in the bed of the truck, and you
could actually see the various parasites leaving the body of
the bobcat just crawling away from it, leaving it like

(33:53):
a sinking ship. That's sad and gross at the same time,
but it's you can just imagine you're a a large predator.
You've killed your prey, and yeah, you get to eat
it now, but also it's parasites potentially get to eat you.
I'm sure they're thinking lucky us. All I'm saying is
the woods are disgusting. That's that's that's but they're beautiful.
And so coming back to the historical side of Ospensky's claim,

(34:18):
it might be possible to to bleed human to death
with ticks. So not exactly clear, but it would probably
take at least two thousand ticks or Sospensky's claim is
not footnoted. So I went digging around to try to
find the earliest reference of this claim about Central Asian
tick torture. In a number of English language books and
magazines the nineteenth and early twentieth century, there are reports

(34:41):
like this, so sort of retelling this rumor, especially that
in the city of Bokara, which is in modern day Uzbekistan,
there was a prison known as Kana Kana in which
prisoners would be tortured and eventually killed by being kept
in a pit infested with thousands of tips. And the
earliest telling of this I found is in a Russian

(35:04):
book called Bokara, Its Emir and its People by the
Russian author Nikolai Vladimirovich Khannikov, with the English translation by
Baron clement A. Debode. And so here's its claim. I
want to read a quote. A corridor leads into another
prison more dreadful than the first, called Kana Kana, a

(35:26):
name which it has received from the swarms of ticks
which infests the place and are reared they're on purpose
to plague the wretched prisoners. I have been told that
in the absence of the ladder, some pounds of raw
meat are thrown in to keep the ticks alive. And
then later a deep pit at least three fathoms in depth,

(35:47):
into which the culprits are let down by ropes. Food
is lowered to them in the same manner. And then
the passage says that later the prisoners they have their
heads shaved and they're loaded with irons and sent barefoot
down to the damp pot bottom of this pit full
of ticks to await their judgment in the Registeran. So

(36:07):
this was reproduced in a review of the book in
an eighteen forty four issue of the Dublin Review. And
there are other nineteenth century reports along these lines, but
most of them look like they're either just repeating this
report or they're repeating other popular rumors about this. And
with stories about these, you never know what to think.
I'm kind of hesitant to believe them. One of the

(36:29):
things is it's a report about an Asian society to
a European audience in an age when you know, even
widely circulated mainstream books books couldn't really be counted on
for much accuracy. Uh, And We've certainly encountered our share
of nineteenth century travelogs that are full of stuff that's
obviously just made up to be sensational. You remember those
ones about the tribes around the world who worshiped man

(36:52):
eating trees and stuff. Uh. And also exactly the reason
it's a fascinating story also makes me more skeptical of it.
You know, it's sensational and lurid and memorable and exactly
the kind of thing that would be tempting to invent
or misrepresent for a sort of orientalist audience who's hungry
for strange and gory details about far off cultures. Yeah.

(37:14):
Plus it's it's so overly complex, right, Yeah, like they're
there are a lot of like baked into the premise
there there are some already excellent ways to be awful
to somebody, you know, just throw them down into a pit.
Like that's pretty terrible in and of itself. You don't
need to add this layer of having to to breed
and maintain uh this you know, enormous population of parasites. Yeah, However,

(37:39):
I can say apparently there's nothing materially all that implausible
about it from what I can tell, So I'd say
It's a very creepy historical possibility, but I wouldn't put
my money on it being true. However, if you're an
expert on the history of Uzbekistan and you want to
let us know you know one way or another whether
you think this account is accurate or all based on

(38:00):
a sliver of truth, you can write us a blow
the mind at how stuff works dot Com and let
us know what you think. Yeah, all right, at this point,
I imagine we should take one more break. When we
come back, we will get into the topic of tick
born illnesses, particularly those associated with the Loan Star tick.

(38:22):
Thank thank alright, we're back all right now. As we
set at the top of this podcast, we hate to
we we don't. We never want to encourage the demonization
of any non human animals, and we may have been
somewhat failing at that today because ticks are so easy
to hate. Um. But I want to suggest one way
to get something good out of tick hatred if it's unavoidable,

(38:43):
which is, take all the arachnophobia that makes you hate
spiders and and just take it off of the spiders
and put it on the ticks. You can do this
in your mind. You can imagine heavy cloud over a
big pool full of spiders, and make that cloud away.
Just drag it away from them and put it over

(39:03):
the ticks. If it's got to go somewhere, put it
on the ticks. Because spiders they're so helpful. Imagine a
world without spiders. You need them to control insect populations.
You'd be miserable in a world without spiders. The world
without ticks, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, even the
most dangerous spiders really they're they're not coming after you know,
not at all. The encounter between human and spider is

(39:26):
occurring more or less by accident. And we do know
that ticks are something to actually worry about in a
way that spiders are not. Ticks are a major vector
of zoonotic diseases and humans and animals. In fact, a
review of a scientific conference called the mid Atlantic Ticks
Summit concluded that ticks are the single most significant vector

(39:48):
of infectious disease in the United States, worse than fleas,
worse than mosquitoes. If you're in the United States and
you're worried about getting a disease from animals, you need
to be worried about ticks. That's right. There are there.
They're actually eleven key tick transmitted diseases, and this makes
them second only to the mosquito in disease variety. Is

(40:09):
that worldwide? Uh? That is that is worldwide? Yes? And uh,
but but in the US alone, we have eight tick
species with twelve particularly problematic species. Yeah, and tickboard illnesses.
We're not going to cover all of them today. We
want to mention a few of the major ones and
some of the more recent interesting ones, especially a tick
acquired allergy. But just to cover a few, we've got

(40:33):
to start with lime disease, right. Yes, Uh, this is
a spread by the black legged tick, and lime disease uh,
in and of itself is a is a is a
a complicated illness that we still don't have a a
complete understanding of now. In addition to lime disease, the
black lighted tick also carries a maltilaria like infection known

(40:55):
as batasiosis and also a form of tick fever in cattle. Now,
the interesting thing about lime disease, to come back to
that is the white footed mouse is the primary reservoir
for this, so it carries lime disease without actually seeming
to suffer any ill effects. But then this spreads to
ticks and then do other animals such as humans, and

(41:17):
that's where you get the problem. Now you also have
the American dog tick, also known as a wood tick,
and this is the primary vector for rocky mounted spotted fever.
Not something you want. And this is potentially fatal and
it's caused by a particular bacterium, yeah, the Rickettsia bacteria. Yeah,
Rickettsia rickettsi. I believe it's a All of these these

(41:40):
these particular illnesses are kind of a mouthful. And then
we come to I guess one of the stars of
today's episode, which is the lone star tick Embloma american
um Yeah, and this is so so called because of
the star shaped silver marking on the females and this
particular um tick you can actually catch a number of

(42:03):
different diseases from it. So according to the University of
Kentucky College of Agriculture, Food and Environment, you can you
can catch the following illnesses from the lone star tick.
Air lichiosis, which you can also get from a black
legged tick. You can also get tulumia, this is also

(42:23):
president in the black legged and American dog ticks, and
uh tuluremia has an interesting history. By the way, it
only boast an overall five percent mortality rate, but the
micro organism that causes it is one of the most
infectious bacteria on Earth. Soviet Union report, Union reported ten

(42:43):
thousand cases of the illness, and then during the German
siege of Stalingrad the following year, the number skyrocketed to
one hundred thousand, and most of these occurred cases occurred
on the German side of the conflict. This is where
it gets a little bit, a little bit weird. Uh.
Former Soviet bioweapons researcher Ken Alabec argue that this surge

(43:04):
and infections was no accident, but the result of biological warfare,
and Alabec would go on to allegedly help develop a
strain of vaccine resistant u to Learmia for the Soviets
before defecting to the United States in Yeah. So, but
of course that's a whole added level of of humans

(43:24):
taking already terrible um biological threats and then augmenting them
in a way. This is the real life version of
the tick torture pit. So. In addition to this, the
lone star tick also carries uh that spotted fever that
we mentioned um also this uh something that is called

(43:45):
star eyes Southern tick associated ration illness, which is not
very well understood now but is can easily be mistaken
for lyme disease, though it's carried by a different tick. Right.
The interesting thing here is that for a while we
thought that that it was very similar to lime disease
and it was caused by a particular spial keet which

(44:08):
is closely related. But according to the CDC, research into
this did not bear the idea out and the current
cause is unknown. So we're getting into the mysterious realm
of some of these tick diseases. I mean, not that
they're magical or anything, but they're just they're just poorly
understood and and many of them have only really come

(44:29):
to the forefront of of research in recent years. Now,
in a minute, we want to focus on this one
very weird particular issue of acquired red meat allergies that
may be associated with tick bites. But first let's look
just a little bit more at the lone star ticket itself.
Give me the back of the baseball card. Stats on

(44:49):
the lone startick. Well, a lot of it comes down
to the differences between the lone star tick and the
black legged tick, which granted both are both are bad.
They're bad news. Both carry pathogens that are harmful to humans.
And the conflict here has been that we've seen, uh
we we've seen the case of the lone star tick

(45:11):
sweeping into the northeastern US replacing the black legged tick
is the most commonly encountered species by humans. So essentially
they're they're moving in on the black legged ticks turf.
They're becoming they're becoming more prevalent, and therefore the the
the pathogens that they carry are more prevalent, So the

(45:32):
lone star ticks are more mobile, making it harder to
create tick free zones for them with with mulch and
wood ship buffers for instance. So that's another thing that
the lone star ticks that have in their favor. Now
I've never heard of this actually, So you can you
can buffer them off of areas by by making what
like moats of mulch essentially, like I understand that that

(45:53):
that goes into some like playground in park planning. Yeah,
but that's not gonna work with the lone star as much.
So the difference comes down to habitat. So the black
legged tick is a forest dweller, but the lone startick
likes hot, dry spaces with an open spaces. So you
have an interesting scenario here where global warming is one

(46:15):
of the causes here behind this this turf war and
expanding in the expanding range of the of of the
of the lone star tick. But it's also because we're
displacing natural forest environments that the black legged ticks tick
likes with the sort of open, dry artificial environments that
lone star ticks like. So be it a be a

(46:38):
highway or you know, um, you know, a neighborhood kind
of community, that's the kind of environment that a lone
star tick is going to thrive in more more so
than a black legged tick. And see a lot of
delicious human skin. Yeah. And another factor here with the
expansion of the lone startick is that lone star ticks

(46:58):
feed on humans, coyotes, fox as other animals, but white
tailed deer and wild turkeys are favored hosts. Now, I've
read that the white tailed deer population and range is
exploding in decades and that is uh, and that's led
to some researchers to suspect that that the explosion of
whitetailed deer may play in a part in the recent

(47:20):
abundance of loan startics as well. Particularly, there was a
two thousand ten Washington University St. Louis study UH led
by a team of ecologist, biologists, and physicians. UH. And
so yeah, you have so you have three things happening,
and all of them are are the fault of human beings. Uh.
Alterations in the climate, the world growing warmer, UH, the

(47:42):
the alteration in in particular environments, changing forests into the
kind of wide open spaces that that the loan startic
is going to thrive. And then UH, an unbalancing of
the environment that enables a prey animal like the tail
deer to run rampant uh and with a few checks

(48:03):
to its population. Don't hate the ticks, hate yourself, Well,
don't hate yourself. Come on, it's not check for ticks.
It's not all on humans. I mean, the ticks are
pretty awful. But here we we do see a strong
case being made for the destabilization of the natural world
and enables uh, the villains of the of the natural

(48:26):
world to take a more uh predominant role. All right, well,
I want to hit you with a particularly odd ticks scenario.
You may have heard about something like this, but if not,
you're in for a ride. All right, So Robert, you're
going out for a hike in the mountains of East Tennessee. Alright,
I a lovely uh, A lovely place to hike. Yeah, yeah, okay,
I've hiked there many times. But if you yourself at

(48:48):
home or trying to imagine doing that, and you're like,
why would I do that, Well, it's because it's where
you got abducted by aliens twenty years ago, and you're
trying to seek recommunion. Okay, But after you get back home,
disappointed a again, you discover a parasite on your body.
It's a small, reddish brown tick with a single white
dot on its back, and it's swollen. It's engorged with blood.

(49:09):
And since you've read your plenty of the Elder, you
know that it's gonna pop any minute because it can't hoop.
So you pluck it off, kill it, and you go
on with your life. But a few weeks later, you're
sitting down for a delicious cookout meal. You've got a
nice cut of aged ribi, and as you eat more
and more of this delicious glistening, medium rare beast flesh.

(49:30):
You might start to feel odd, or you might not.
It might it might take four to six hours before
you start to feel odd. But either way, eventually you
start itching all over and you develop red rashes or hives.
You realize you're having an allergic reaction, and it could
get worse. You could experience diarrhea, vomiting, trouble breathing, low

(49:51):
blood pressure, and if it's a particularly severe case, it
could even be life threatening. So perhaps you are not
one to learn quickly, and you keep trying to eat
red meat, only to discover that it happens every time.
You've developed this horrible allergic reaction that kicks in every
time you chow down on some red meat. So what's

(50:11):
going on here? Well, this is a question that actually
a lot of people have been asking in in recent decades,
and starting I think in the nineteen nineties, people really
started to notice there were these stories of acquired red
meat allergy syndrome, and an allergy and immunology researcher named
Thomas Platts Mills at the University of Virginia School of

(50:33):
Medicine has been studying this phenomenon for more than a decade.
And if you want to read more about this, there's
actually a really good recent article and Wired that tells
the story of how platts Mills and colleagues slowly unraveled
the story. But to give you the simple version, Platts
Mills have been hearing these reports for years that people
in certain regions the country, primarily the southeast, had picked

(50:54):
up the sudden allergy to red meat and this would
cause them to break out in sweats and hives after eating.
And oddly, the range of these reports almost perfectly overlapped
the range of the lone star tick, the tick we
were talking about a minute ago. And later he heard
of similar symptoms being developed by patients who were taking

(51:14):
a cancer treatment called satuximab, and apparently the drug was
proving effective, but after taking it, people with it would
have the same meat allergy symptoms in these same meat
allergy regions of the country. That's kind of odd. So
by teaming up with the drugs manufacturer, Platts Mills determined

(51:34):
that the people experiencing the reaction to this cancer drug
at enormous quantities of antibodies targeting a specific carbohydrate, a
carbohydrate that was in the drug but that's also in
red meat. Now you might be like, wait a minute,
I thought meat didn't have any carbs. Well, meat doesn't
have a lot of carbs, But red meat is not

(51:55):
just protein and fat. Mammalian muscle tissues contain a sugar
called galactose alpha one three galactose, known for short as
alpha gal and this sugar is found in meats like beef,
lamb and pork, and if you have an allergy to
alpha gel, consumption of that type of meat can be

(52:15):
a potentially life threatening risk. So after they found out
about this, over the next few years, Platts, Mills and
many colleagues and co authors published some papers in the
Journal of Clinical Immunology started to zero in on the problem.
In two thousand nine, they isolated what the meat allergy
patients had in common, which is that eight of them

(52:36):
are actually more than eight percent of them had reported
being bitten by a tick. And then later in two
thousand eleven, they published a paper in a Journal of
Clinical Immunology showing a direct link between tick bites and
the proliferation of I G E antibodies that's allergy antibodies
for alpha gel for this sugar that's found found in

(52:57):
meat and was found in that cancer drug that was
causing reactions in people. So it looks pretty clear that
people who get bitten by the lone Star tick are
the ones who are developing these meat allergies, but we
don't know why. We still don't know what's causing the
tick bites to create these I G. E. Antibodies, but
researchers are working on the problem. So there are lots

(53:19):
of questions. Could it be some pathogen, is it a
germ spread by the tick, or is it something in
the ticks saliva that's similar to alpha gel, which triggers
a sensitizing exposure in the immune system, and then later
your immune system mistakes alpha gel for whatever it encountered
in the ticks saliva. We don't know yet, so just
to recap it could be a new pathogen to add

(53:41):
to the established list of pathogens. It's very yeah, but
it's very possibly just something bioactive in the ticks saliva
because there's tons of bioactive stuff. They're essentially a complication
that arises in the battle between our immune system and
this the invasion of our tissue. Okay, yeah, this is

(54:01):
a I should I should mention that I actually have
a family member who who suffers from this who red meat,
who suffers from the red meat allergy? Uh, caused by
a lone star tick bite. Yeah, and uh, I mean
it's so does this family member that they just don't
eat meat anymore. They can they can still eat um

(54:23):
like poultry and fish obviously, but but yeah, they have
to they have to forego eating eating red meat, eating
pork steak. Was this person a meat lover? Yes, very
much so. So this isn't a certainly a scenario where
since I don't I don't need a lot of red
meat anymore. I have to kind of translate it into

(54:44):
my own diet and think what I have just just
because I got bit by a tick out in the woods,
suddenly I could eat I could not eat anymore shrimp.
You're allergic to coffee? Yeah, or coffee or you know
some other element that plays an important role in my
daily diet, And that that would just that would really
be some garbage news, especially if it's it's the fault

(55:05):
of this this stupid parasite that latched onto me in
the woods one day. Now, I have heard accounts of
people who are just like, well, you know, I've got
my EpiPen. I'll just I'll just get through. Don't this
can be dangerous, Like these anaphylactic reactions are are dangerous
and could potentially kill you if you have a really
severe one. So you shouldn't just try to say, well,

(55:28):
I'll get through it, I'll eat the red meat. I
want to deal with the hives now. I was in
reading some material from the University of Kentucky about about this, uh,
this redneat allergy that arises from the lone start tick bites.
It did point out that the reaction can occur in
people with a history of strong reactions to tick bites.
This is redness and itching at a bite side to

(55:49):
last for weeks or from many bites from a single incident.
So again, there are a lot of questions and a
lot of a lot of unanswered questions regarding this particular ailment.
But you can, you can, you can. I think that
helps to find the problem a little bit. Now. One
way that this problem has gotten even weirder in recent

(56:11):
years is that people outside the normal loan startick range
have started showing up with symptoms of the alpha gel allergy.
It's not exactly clear why this is uh, These people
may have like picked up lone star tick bites while
traveling into lone startik territory. Could be it or is
it that the lone startick is expanding its range? And

(56:32):
there are some clues, as we discussed a minute ago,
that this might be the case, since we already know
the loan startik has expanded its range significantly over the
last two or three decades. And if it's primary prey
animal is like white tailed deer and that's exploding all
over the place, wouldn't be all that hard to see
why the tick would be expanding. Indeed, another poorly understood

(56:57):
stood condition I think we may have mentioned it earlier
associated with the lone star tick is this starry disease,
which as we said, stands for Southern tick associated rash illness.
And and this just mainly manifests as like a red
bulls eye rash around the side of the bite that
expands to a diameter of about eight centimeters in some
way similar to lyme disease, but not the same disease. Now.

(57:20):
In in Bill Shoots a book, he he made a
couple of points about this. He said that one of
the plus sides. Is that's just that the star I
is milder than lyme disease and the other uh, the
the other plus here if you want to call it.
That is, according to him, the bite of the lone
star tike is more painful than many other varieties of tick,

(57:41):
giving you perhaps a heads up on on the on
the bite and the presence of the parasite, and giving
you because as we'll discuss this, one of the key
things with with ticks is if you have one attached
your body, you want to go ahead and get it off,
and you want to get it off in the correct fashion. Yeah.
Now we are about to get into some practical tick

(58:02):
tips in just a minute. But right before we do that,
I wanted to quickly note the most awful tick story
I've ever heard. It's even worse than the tick torture.
I think, just in case you were still considering going
outside this summer, Joe is going to dissuade you. Paper
published in two thousand one in the Archives of Ophthalmology.

(58:24):
I found this through an image search indirectly. Um. This
paper is titled lone star tick bite of the conjunctiva.
The conjunctiva. If you're not familiar. It's your eye as
in conjunctive itis. Yes, so uh. They report two different
cases of lone star tick bites to the eyeball in

(58:47):
this both in the summer of two thousand the year
two thousand, and both within a hundred mile radius of
each other. Very odd. So, in July two thousand, a
five year old girl showed up in an Arkansas hospital
with a spot on the white of her eye. It
was a lone Star tick sucking her eyeball. Fortunately, she
was sedated and the tick was successfully removed. And then

(59:10):
in August of two thousand, a two year old girl
also showed up at a hospital within a hundred miles
of the first one with a tick on her eyeball,
again successfully removed. In both cases, the patient was fine.
So you don't need to worry about these kids. They're
they're all right. They how old would they be now?
You know they're they're in their twenties. They're they're fine. Now,
I mean, actually I don't know, but I assume they're fine.

(59:32):
There's no reason to assume they're not fine. But yeah,
crazy question, why so close together we're ticks? Deciding In
the summer of two thousand in this region around Arkansas
to start biting people's eyes or was there some kind
of tick ritual going on? Are you just looking at
the picture, Robert, Oh, yeah, I'm sorry, I have just
we have. It's a black and white image too. It's
not even the full color that's present for you on

(59:55):
the screen. But yeah, okay, now that's the full color there. Yeah,
it's it's serving. And on top of this, the case
has to involve small children, which makes it even more horrific. Yeah,
come on, ticks, have you no shame? Okay, well, I
think we should finish up with some practical advice on
how to avoid tick problems. Now, obviously this is not
a medical advice show. We are not doctors. If your

(01:00:18):
doctor tells you something conflicting with what we're saying, obviously
trust the doctor, not us. But we're just trying to
report on what major authorities, like the CDC you have
to say about avoiding tick born illness. Um, So here
are a few basic tick protection rules. So, first of all,
never go outdoors, never go into the woodlands of of

(01:00:40):
East Tennessee. You can't do that. That's true. If you're
you're denying yourselves the wonders of the natural world. One
thing you can do is while encountering the wonders of
the natural world, you can certainly tuck your pants into
your socks, wear socks, wear shoes, and uh, put on
some d eat uh some bug spray with deet in it,

(01:01:03):
generally on exposed skin. That stat coming to us from
the University of Kentucky. Yeah, CDC recommends a minimum of
solution of deet in your in your bug spray. Another
thing that can help if you're out hiking around in
the woods, because obviously you can't stay inside. I mean,
it's beautiful out there. I love the woods. So one
thing that does help is just stay on the trail,

(01:01:25):
avoid walking through brush in a way that brings your
body into lots of direct contact with plant matter. Now
why does that work, Well, it helps in a little
bit about the hunting strategy of ticks. Ticks can't fly
or leap out at you like fleas or something. A
hard ticks hunt for hosts with a trick called questing.

(01:01:46):
Nice word, and what it means is they find a
nice little spot on a piece of vegetation like a
leaf or strand of grass, and they clutch that surface
with their back legs and then they reach out with
their front legs. And I want to add that that
eggers use the same the same method resting. Yeah, so
if you brush by coming into contact with this plant,

(01:02:07):
matter where they're hanging out, it will grab hold of
you with its front legs and hang on and then
try to find a space to bite. So if you
don't give them a chance to grab hold, it's much
less likely that you're gonna get ticks. So does that
make sense? You just don't push through the leaves, try
to keep some distance between yourself and the plants. Well,
I think that the way to translate this into into

(01:02:30):
your encounter with the wilderness is if you're going on
a hike, stay on the trail exactly. Don't go, you know,
trouncing off into the into the into the waist high grass.
Uh for you know, certainly to use the restroom. This
is that's already bringing them mind too many horrific scenarios.
Just stay on the path and hold it you get

(01:02:51):
to an actual restroom, or just go on the trail.
There's no shame. If someone of Jackson says, what are
you doing? That's gross? You say, look there are ticks
out there, triggers out there. Um, you can just look
the other way while I finish. Exactly, it's all nature.
Another thing. You can treat clothes with permethrin. CDC says, Uh.

(01:03:11):
But let's say you've got a tick. All right, you've
gone out, you realize you've got a tick. What to do?
Find it and remove it as soon as possible. So
it's important after you get done with a hike or
being out in the woods or something, shower as soon
as you get home from outdoor activity and search your body,
clothes and your gear for ticks. And maybe even most importantly,

(01:03:32):
if you take your pets with you, search your pets.
I love my dog, but he is a tick magnet.
He loves to It's it's almost as if he's directly
avoiding the advice we just said a minute ago about
staying in the middle of the trail because he wants
to brush against all of the vegetation. It's like he's
doing it on purpose. Yeah. Yeah, certainly acquaint yourself with

(01:03:54):
your own body after a venture into tick land. And
if you have a small child, that's so important. Uh
look them over. Yeah, Like in my family, like already
with my five year old. Uh. Tick check is just
what you do after you've been around the woods. Yeah, Uh,
not that hard to do. You just look around, make
sure you don't have anything. Uh, let's say you do

(01:04:15):
find one. You're back home. You've discovered a tick on
your body. How to remove it? You you've probably heard
a million different things. Put vasiline on it, put mayonnaise
on it, kill it with fire, you know, use a
use a lighter or a hot needle or something. Ceed says, C.
D C says, don't bother, forget it all. Just get
the thing off of you as fast as you can.

(01:04:35):
And the method they recommend is tweezers. Get a pair
of tweezers, and what you do is you grab the
tick with tweezers as close down to the skin as
you can. What you're trying to do is grab it
by its head and not by its swelling abdomen, and
you squeeze gently, trying not to crush it, and you
pull it upward with a steady, gentle motion. And you

(01:04:57):
don't twist, you don't jerk. You're trying not to break
off the tick's mouth parts inside your skin. If you
do break off the mouth parts inside your skin. You
want to try to remove those with the tweezers as well.
Then you want to clean the bite area with disinfectant
like alcohol or iodine or soap and water. Once you've
got a removed tick, do not crush it with your fingers,

(01:05:20):
drop it in alcohol or some of their poison to
safely kill it, or just drop it in the toilet
and flush it down. And if you do get a
tick bite and you get a rash or a fever
within a few weeks of the bite, you see a
doctor and tell them about it. Yes, And in the
case of star I believe that can manifest it as
soon as seven days. So so yeah, it's not once

(01:05:41):
the tick is removed. Uh, keep an eye on how
the bite area is behaving, yes, exactly, and also also
keep an eye out for for general symptoms of signals.
If you get headache, fever, things like that, see a doctor.
Tell them you were bit by a tick, remember when
you got bit. Especially if you can tell what the
tick looks like, that'll help too. Yes, indeed, back if

(01:06:05):
you were if you're drowning the thing in alcohol and
not flushing it down the toilet, you could even hang
on to the specimen. Should that become important later on, Hey,
I got a shot glass full of whiskey and seventeen
ticks f last summer in it. Yeah, I mean, don't
get don't go crazy with it, don't start a tick collection. Um,
we'll get into uncomfortable territory there, I think, pretty quickly.

(01:06:26):
But making now, you could hang onto it, or I
guess you could take a photo of it. That's maybe
less grotesque if you have the appropriate you know, zoom
on your your camera. I think the moral of today's
story is that at some point in your life you
will get a tick in your eyeball. Oh no, no, no,
no no. I I think the argument is, don't worry

(01:06:47):
about the ticks in the highball, don't worry about the
the the exotic pits full of ticks, or even about
the uh you know that the tick borne pathogens that
have been uh that have been altered in Soviet bio
weapons labs. But yeah, just the worry. Let even don't worry,
but be aware of the everyday a threat posed by

(01:07:07):
tickborn path Don't worry, be vigilant, safe, be vigilant. Ticks
are a part of your world. Chiggers are a part
of your world and just act accordingly. So there you
have it, an introduction to the world of ticks and
some of the mites, what you need to be aware of,
what you need to to do to remain vigilant against them.

(01:07:27):
I'm worried I may have gone overboard today and giving
into my tick demonization feelings. So I know, I know,
I know that's not what we do here. We don't
demonize animals, even when they're scary. But but you've got
to keep an open eye even if you don't hate them. Well,
the thing is, they're coming after your blood. And it's
like that scene in The Mosquito Coast where where Harrison

(01:07:48):
Ford's the character kills the mosquito on the kid's neck
and says, uh, says, that's that's your blood, not his,
or I guess it would be hers. Right, it's a mosquito.
I can't I can't remember the exact quote, but it's
a valid point. Uh. Yes, you know, honor the natural world,
be considerate in your dealings with other life forms. But
if that life form is after your blood, you're gonna

(01:08:11):
have to step to the threat. Right, that's where you
draw the all right, and stay in the middle of
the past. Indeed, Hey, if you want to check out
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(01:08:33):
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(01:09:22):
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