Ewww...

FYI! (From a news bulletin.) Welcome to New England! Be careful out there!

Abundant snow over the winter and a wet spring have created ideal conditions for ticks to come out in the warm weather and try to latch onto hosts, they said.

“The next three to four weeks is the peak season of risk,” said Sam Telford, an infectious disease professor at Tufts University and an authority on Lyme disease.

“That’s when the nymphal ticks emerge and appear in large numbers. It’s going to be gangbusters the next few weeks,” Telford said.

The nymphs, some as small as a period in a newspaper, are much harder to detect than the full-grown ticks more commonly seen in the fall.

At a site he monitors on Nantucket, Telford found twice the number of ticks last week as he did last year.

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Permalink Reply by Natalie, Lance &Tucker on June 17, 2014 at 12:51am

:O hate ticks....ewwwww is right...

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Permalink Reply by Linda on June 17, 2014 at 7:02am

We live in eastern NY, in the foothills of the Catskill Mts which is a high tick area to begin with. They have been warning us that it's going to worse than normal. If you live in a high tick area get your dogs vaccinated for Lyme. Max had Lyme before he came to us and was treated tho he will always show a mild positive for the disease. Both Max & Katie are vaccinated yearly. Save your pet and yourselves a lot of heartbreak.

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Permalink Reply by Holly on June 17, 2014 at 8:40am

The vet vaccinated my dog as a matter of course, but I didn't think to get myself vaccinated. Good idea. Still, I hate to deal with them regardless. The deer ticks and nymphs are so tiny they are almost impossible to see.

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Permalink Reply by Beth on June 17, 2014 at 10:13am

Ick. My vet told me years ago that you would never find a nymph tick on a dog.

Maddie tested positive for Lyme but the more sensitive antibody test showed it was an old infection, so she wasn't treated. My parents' dog has had Lyme twice. We've never tested Jack because we can't do bloodwork on him, but he's vaccinated and so is Maddie, as well as using K9 Advantix year-round.

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Permalink Reply by sarah & tapiola on June 22, 2014 at 9:31am

I can attest to this. We live in Maine. I've only found one tick on Tapiola in his entire life, and last week I found THREE on him in the space of a few days :(

We use K9 Advantix II, but obviously it isn't being very effective right now. We're going to the vet for the lyme vaccine this week (try to avoid vaccines if possible but this is just too much).

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Permalink Reply by Zigward & Kimberly on June 22, 2014 at 11:48pm

UGH! I'm an Oregonian, so when I moved to NH a while back (back in OR now though) I had never experienced anything like the amount of ticks that I saw there. Not only did we have to remove them from Ziggy a couple of times, but one day at work I went to swoop my hair into a ponytail and my finger caught something that was behind my ear lobe... YES, it was a TICK. ON ME. I was so freaked out and disgusted I just couldn't get myself together enough to be a good employee for the rest of that day.

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Permalink Reply by Vicky Hay on June 23, 2014 at 9:53pm

Horrid!!!!! One wonders what God had in mind when She created creatures like mosquitoes and ticks. Can't think of a more vile, useless species.

It's never too late to move to Arizona, though! :-D My dogs almost never get a tick. Maybe one in their entire lifetime. At most.

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Permalink Reply by Linda on June 23, 2014 at 10:55pm

I do live in the city and we don't take the dogs into high grass on trail walks so we've been lucky tho this year I tend to check them more. I've only had 1 tick in my life and I had to go the TN to get that one.