Stumbled across a worried-mommy article on Slate today, The Year of the Tick. Despite the suburban northeastern, almost alarmist tone, it's not a bad read. Some of the links were of interest too, namely one about how to treat your outdoor clothes with permethrin, and another on how remove ticks by the CDC. That last one's simple and a non-gimicky, authoritative resource on the matter.
It's an ongoing summertime problem for mountain bikers, hikers, campers, etc. – all the sorts of things that go on in this household. A couple of points from The Resident Biologist are worth mentioning, in addition to the above links:
- Drink your Monster drinks, or at least take vitamin B tab ahead of hitting the outdoors. Ticks don't like the taste of blood full of vitamin B, and Monster is full of it, maybe along with a few other things they don't like too.
- The bumper crop of acorns --> more woods mice --> more ticks problem described in the Slate article isn't so much a "too many mice" problem. It's more of a "not enough snakes" problem. Stop putting the genocide on common, harmless snakes and the mouse and tick problem would likely be cleaned out PDQ.
Finally, here's the punch line from the CDC article, if you're too busy to click through:
Then kill it. Kill it with fire.
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