![]() ![]() Wear lighter clothing if you go on a hike so that any ticks can be easily spotted.When you come in from a hike, or anywhere else you might have picked up a tick, carefully check yourself. ![]() How to avoid tick bites in colder weatherĮxperts suggest several measures that people can take to avoid getting Lyme in the winter months: While most Lyme cases are reported in the spring and summer, there are reports every month, he said. “Provided you remove the tick promptly, the chances of infection go down dramatically,” Tokarz said. The good news is because the adult ticks are so much larger, they are easier to detect and remove before they’ve passed on the disease-causing bacteria. So, the bad news is that if someone is bitten by an adult tick in winter, there’s a much greater chance it will be infected and pass on the bacteria than a nymph would in the spring and early summer. Topaz’s tick studies on Long Island, New York, revealed that about 15% to 20% of nymphs carried the bacteria, while some 60% to 75% of adults carried it. Adults are far larger and much easier to spot. Ticks in the nymph stage can be hard to detect because they are about the size of a poppy seed, experts say. When they become nymphs, their next stage, infected ticks can pass on the disease to humans, their pets and other animals, which also may be carrying the bacteria.īy the time ticks become adults, they will have had two opportunities to pick up Borrelia burgdorferi: from infected mice in their larval stage and from infected animals, often deer, in their nymph stage. The larvae become infected when they bite a mouse infected with the bacteria. The first stage, the larval stage, isn’t worrisome because the ticks haven’t picked up the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, officially known as Borrelia burgdorferi. Ticks have a three-stage lifecycle, and in each stage, they take just one “blood meal,” Tokarz said. Both of those ticks can infect people with Rocky Mountain s potted f ever. This also applies to other ticks we have to worry about in the U.S., such as lone star ticks and dog ticks, Ostfeld said. “When it warms in March and April, you’ll see a second wave of activity” among ticks that hadn’t yet found someone to bite, he added. Ticks that spread Lyme disease can last through the entire winter, he said. Ladislav Kubeš / Getty Images/iStockphoto While most infections happen in the spring and summer there are cases reported every month. Lyme disease is spread by the bite of a black-legged tick. “So the risk of an adult tick finding us in the winter will get higher,” said Richard Ostfeld, a tick expert at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. The government released the new National Climate Assessment report Tuesday, with the prediction that most areas of the U.S. While tick bites are expected to decline as freezing temperatures hit, climate change is making matters worse. In fact, emergency room visits for tick bites, which had been declining since the summer peak, are rising in some parts of the United States, especially in the Northeast, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ![]()
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