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- Hacker News
- Calls to mind one of my favorite Simpsons moments.by Hnrobert42
- I am grateful that everything points to the fact I was able to aquire tick resistance. Bites get itchy the moment ticks start to feed, and nymphs die in a matter of minutes while feeding on me.by wolvesechoes
- A healthy wolf population is the proper (trophic cascading) solution to the tick epidemic.by pcmaffey
- I would much rather encounter a hungry tick on a recreational trail than a hungry wolfby roshin
- Can you expand on this provide me pointer to research for this? I am not an expert in the fields but it seems very interestingby gbalduzzi
- No ticks at the altitude I reside. But with global warming it's slowly creeping up towards the towns further down. Same with Spanish slugs. Will soon be able to thrive here as well.by matsemann
- We have dog ticks at 8000 feet in Colorado, not sure how much altitude affects them.by sojournerc
- I got bitten by a mosquito in Ottawa a couple years ago that sent me to the hospital.. I stopped near the river while cycling to see a raccoon for few seconds, was more than enough for that lil sucker to do the job.by tamimio
- There are some potentially very nasty diseases spread by ticks and insects. For example, flaviviruses like West Nile, Dengue, and Powassan (which debilitated and ultimately killed the wife of Canadian fantasy author Charles de Lint.)by pfdietz
- I got bitten by a tick at a cottage near Ottawa and got a fever then bell's palsy a month later. I didn't even notice I got bit at all at the time. A year later, I went to the hospital for a swollen knee and had surgery done, and ended up being tested positive for lyme disease. The doc says you're too young to have bell's palsy and arthritis. Careful out there!by winxton
- Through a combination of two of my hobbies, I learned that pyrethroids are toxic to aquatic animals. Glad to see that they used "locations [that] were situated away from waterbodies". Pyrethroids are very powerful tools for insect control (and non-toxic to humans) but any place where you have runoff or ground seepage is going to be a problem. Aren't those places the ones most likely for ticks to thrive -- areas near bodies of water where animals like deer come to drink?
So hot take: this would only be useful in places where there are not a lot of ticks?
(PS: Permethrin-sprayed clothing is very effective.)
by washbasin - This reminds me I need to respray my tick pants. Thanks.by pfdietz
- Deer ticks will go after pretty much anything warm blooded: coyotes, mice, dogs, etc etc etc.
Proximity to water doesn't seem to factor much either. Where I live, ticks this year are horrendous and everywhere.
by MegaDeKay - They’re also very toxic to cats, which is why dogs & cats have different flea & tick medicines.by e28eta
- I've spread beneficial nematodes several times before and the following 2-3 years I get notably fewer tick bites. They are a bit of a pain to spread over any significant area.by pluralmonad
- Can you give us some more detail on the nematodes, or point us to an article?by andrewl
- Don't know which is worse - - contracting Lyme disease, or Parkinson's disease from Permethrin and other pesticide exposure:
https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2009/09/occupatio...
- Lyme disease is not the only tick disease.
There's alpha gal (red meat allergy ) and also ascending paralysis. And more.
by mbac32768 - It's only hazardous when wet. I spray my clothes and then let them dry on the clothesline.
- Your first link talks about occupational use. Most folks aren't going to have that sort of exposure. A lot of things are definitely a hazard when you work with them often, but doesn't carry over into the general population whose exposure is very low.
Your second link speaks of animal studies, using 34mg/kg of body weight in very young animals (rats) between 6 and 21 days old. Animal studies are valuable, but it doesn't mean you carry the same risk of rats. I'm not sure most folks are going to get that much exposure while walking along trails - for me, personally, it would take 1870mg of repeated exposure. I understand that it would take less exposure for children, but an average newborn is around 3kg and the newborns aren't walking along trails - and in most circumstances, neither are their parents. Especially the mother, who just recently gave birth.
It isn't that I'm saying that pesticide exposure is always healthy or anything, but the type of study and the doses are important to give perspective.
by Broken_Hippo - What's interesting about this study is that ticks were reduced by 50% with untreated woodchips (no pesticides!)
- That's easy - lyme disease. If you read the studies you linked, it even shows this very clearly.
The first study is talking about constant occupational exposure. By people not wearing basic PPE, over the course of many many years. It's like taking a shower in permethrin every day for 30 minutes. You can pretty much substitute lots of every day things that get absorbed by skin for "permethrin" here and it would cause some very serious symptoms.
The second study used 34mg/kg of permethrin. That is an insane amount, and one that you could not even likely get without intentional ingestion of concentrated powder form.
If you weight 150lbs, that is 2300mg. So a huge horse sized pill of permethrin, every day, will cause issues.
Shocking.
2300mg a day of most substances will cause issues.
Hell, 2300mg a day of most things will cause serious issues faster than permethrin
2300mg of vitamin b3 would destroy your liver very quickly (weeks/months).
2300mg of vitamin b6 would cause permanent nerve damage very quickly (weeks/months)
etc
The reason we don't classify all pesticides as equally dangerous is because they are not all equally dangerous.
Lumping them all together and painting them with a single brush is as unhelpful here as it is when it is done in any other context.
Permethrin is just a synthetic version of pyrethrin, which is extracted from chrysanthemums.
It is probably one of the least harmful substances you will ever be around.
Lyme disease is easily a much greater threat to people than exposure to permethrin and derivatives while hiking.
The exposure to wood dust and other small particles from disturbing the wood chips is probably a greater threat than the permethrin.
by DannyBee - Really the best is to check for ticks and weird bruises with a partner every so often.
Got Lyme disease from a tick years ago and it was very visible -> a spreading red bruise with a white middle (it get bigger and looks like it's not healing) When spotted some antibiotics did their jobs in two weeks if I remember correctly. I should check the other diseases' visual clues too.
by danubis - Not every case of Lyme disease has said bruise, and there's other tick borne diseases that ticks pass to you faster post-bite and are harder to treat than early onset Lyme disease is.
The best is to never get bitten at all.
by goda90 - Seems likely that ticks should go in the same category as mosquitoes -- how long until we use gene-drive tech to completely eradicate them?by gcanyon
- At what cost to the larger ecosystem. They are the base of a larger food web. Many creatures rely on eating themby ravetcofx
- If you are out in the woods and you come upon a roughly circular area of crushed down grass, that is a deer bed. Try and avoid walking through it, deer beds are full of ticks.
The deer trails are a lot harder to avoid.
by opwieurposiu - Not sure if it was a deer bed or what but when I was kid I lay down in the grass and when I got up I had over 100 ticks on my shirt.
- I avoid grass all together- especially in the woods.by umpalumpaaa
- We have (had?) some ticks in our backyard and I came across these which I thought was a clever attack angle: tick tubes.
Permethrin-soaked cotton balls in a tube, mice find them and build nests out of the freely available cotton, ticks that the mice have gathered while walking around die when they come back to the nest.
by kbaker