Defeating the Tick
by Robert Brown Butler

John Borhman had heard enough about Lyme disease to want to avoid it.  So he left his estate in bucolic northern Westchester Counter early in the spring and moved to his New York City penthouse.  Being an avid gardener, he set a few potted plants out on his terrace, then settled back to enjoy them twenty stories above the ground.  Unfortunately, a migrating nighthawk with an acarine passenger aboard sought a fleeting rest upon his foliage, and while there the engorged acarine fell off.  Subsequently, the gentleman was marked with the ‘scarlet letter’ of this dread disease:  a target-shaped red rash under his arm.

This anecdote tells us two things.  One, a dominant means of spreading tick-born diseases today is by birds, a fact supported by recent isolated blooms of Lyme disease in northern Georgia and eastern Texas.  Two, virtually no one is completely safe from these cleverly invasive parasites.

Given these conclusions and the fact that tick-borne illnesses are occurring more frequently all over the nation today, many are nervously seeking information on how these dangerous relative of the spider satisfy their appetites, in hopes of not being part of the feast.  For example, how does this bug ‘bite’ if it has no mouth and no teeth?  How does it hold on as it feeds for days at a time?  And how do disease bacteria migrate out of its body while it is sucking blood inward?

First, some background on these parasites.  In America there are three general subspecies that feed on humans and their pets.  (1) The dog tick, whose oval-shaped brown body is about an eighth-inch long, (2) the lone star tick, which originally hailed from Texas and has a tiny white spot on its back, and (3) the deer tick, of which the male’s body is a shiny near-black and the female’s is copper-colored with a dark brown spot behind its neck.  The deer tick is the primary vector of Lyme disease, but all ticks may infect their victims with a dozen rare but potentially deadly illnesses.