8 Best Ways to Avoid Tick Bites by Rona Cherry l Lyme Disease Awareness

Many people shrug off Lyme disease thinking it’s a threat they don’t need to worry about. Yet your risk is higher than you think. Ticks are everywhere and can be a serious threat to your health - even if you take antibiotics.

While Lyme is the predominant tick-borne illness in the U.S., with 300,000 new cases a year, it isn’t the only one. In addition to Lyme disease, ticks are responsible for Rocky Mountain spotted fever, southern tick-associated rash illness, and a number of other serious diseases.

A bite from an infected tick can leave you with a mix of symptoms that range from fatigue and flu-like aches and pains to serious and long-term complications that affect the joints, nerves, brain, heart, muscles. The best way to avoid getting sick is not to get bitten in the first place. Here are eight ways to stay tick safe.

Use Repellents

Of course, in the hot summer months, the advice to wear a long-sleeved shirt and long pants may be tough to follow. If possible, wear clothing (shorts or pants, shirt, socks) treated with permethrin, a repellent that kills ticks. You can buy permethrin-treated items from companies such as Insect Shield, Columbia and REI. You can also spray your own clothes with permethrin, but carefully follow directions and precautions. As a first line of defense, spray your shoes. Ticks don’t jump, so they usually first attach to a person’s foot or leg and then crawl up to other parts of the body.

But remember, Permethrin products should never be used on the skin. Instead, use products such as Sawyers Fisherman’s Formula with picaridin, Repel Lemon Eucalyptus and Off! Depends VIII with DEET on exposed skin. All three repellents were recommended recently by Consumer Reports.

Keep Up With Your Landscaping

Ticks love to hide in plants and shrubs and are mostly found near the edge of a lawn in shady areas. They require a lot of humidity to survive and tend to stay away from well-groomed lawns that lack shade. Mow grass regularly, remove weeds, clear leaf litter and brush, especially along the edges of the lawn, stonewalls and driveways. The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station has developed a comprehensive Tick Management Handbook for preventing tick bites. Among its landscaping suggestions: restrict the use of ground cover such as pachysandra in areas frequented by family and roaming pets, and move firewood piles and bird feeders away from the house.

Prevention is Key

According to a Wall Street Journal article, more than half of the 12,000 Americans surveyed do nothing to reduce their risk of tick bites during warm weather. Yet tick-borne diseases can cause serious and debilitating health problems. While antibiotics are usually effective if taken within 24-36 hours of being bitten by a Lyme-infected tick, up to 20 percent of treated individuals go on to suffer long-term complications such as severe arthritis, disabling fatigue, impaired vision, memory loss and other cognitive problems.

“People think that if they take antibiotics they’ve eliminated any possible problem, but that’s not the case,” says Harriet Kotsoris, M.D., chief scientific officer of Global Lyme Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to research and education. Plus there is no treatment for newly identified tick-borne viral infections.