I know a lot of people who spend a lot of time in nature, who have not gotten lyme disease. But I know some who have, and lyme disease in the Chicago region is said to be increasing.
For many years I sprayed my ankles and legs with bug repellent. It has always worked to ward off the bugs I fear most, ticks and chiggers.
But more recently I've relied on pants treated by the commercial company Insect Shield. That works too, and I don't have to think about it.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.06.021
ReplyDelete“England et al. show that the naturally accumulated static charges of terrestrial animals are sufficient to passively attract ticks across air gaps of several body lengths of the tick. This electrostatic attraction likely improves the host seeking efficiency of ticks and many other parasites by increasing the range at which they can attach to hosts.”
Crazy stuff!
Bill Kleiman just had a good post on the GRN site talking about this same issue. https://grasslandrestorationnetwork.org/2023/05/25/pest-shields/
Products like Insect Shield & spray-on permethrin eventually wear off with repeated washing, so it’s probably best to use them as a secondary line of defense while continuing to rely on sealing of pant leg openings & thorough tick checks once at home.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6326861/
Pants sent to Insect Shield for treatment were washed 16 times & then they assessed how many blacklegged ticks had normal movement after 30-120 seconds of exposure to the treated fabric. After washing, 30% of the ticks were moving normally compared to 0% before washing. An interesting observation is that socks didn’t repel as well as pants, possibly because the looser weave of socks exposed ticks to less insecticide.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9272190/
This study sent uniforms to Insect Shield to be treated, which were then worn for a field season. After a season of wear & washing, most of the sample uniforms only killed <30% of blacklegged ticks who were exposed to the fabric for 3 minutes, compared to 97% before the field season.