June 13, 2001
By Lisa Ellis
InteliHealth News Service
Andrew Spielman, a Lyme disease researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health, offers these tips for avoiding infection in areas prone to Lyme disease:
- Avoid brush — the area where meadow and forest meet. "Stepping off your lawn into this environment gives you a 90-fold increase of risk." Deer and white-footed mice, the main hosts for deer ticks, are abundant in brushy areas.
- Tuck your pants into your socks. Nymphal ticks — the most dangerous developmental stage — crawl onto a person's shoes and then ascend to the skin. "If your pants are tucked in and they are light in color there's an excellent chance of seeing such a black tick in time to brush it off."
- Use two types of repellants. Permethrin, which is found in an array of brand-name aerosol insecticides, should be sprayed on clothing. Use a repellant containing Deet on skin, with a maximum concentration of 30 percent for adults or 10 percent for children.
- Check yourself repeatedly for ticks. Wearing light colored clothing helps you to spot them.
If you find a tick, Spielman says, "remove it with tweezers, as near the point of contact as you can. Yank it off. With a deer tick, you usually leave the mouth parts behind, but this is harmless. A dead tick cannot transmit." Avoid skin contact with the tick once its body is ruptured.
If you find an engorged tick on your skin, a single dose of antibiotics (doxycycline, 200 milligrams) within three days can dramatically reduce the chances of developing Lyme disease.
In the past, another option for prevention has been vaccination; unfortunately, the manufacturers of the Lyme vaccination announced in March of 2002 that it was being withdrawn from the market because of poor sales.
