Today my wife woke me in a panic

I have had three ticks embedded over the past year. After the last one, I got the tick removal tool. Once the tick is removed, I coat the wound site with tincture of iodine and follow up for next few days with a topical antibiotic ointment. I also contact my GP and request a prescription of doxycyline. tick bite take up to three months to heal for me. All my neighbors and several friends have had Lyme disease but so far I have managed to avoid it. The quarterly dose of Brevecta the dog gets seems to keep him tick free.
 
WD-40 works. So does Acetone. Also, gasoline, paint stripper, brake cleaner, freezer spray.

Maybe there can be had one of those cosmetic body moisturizing creams that can be used instead of soap in the shower, that might leave a bad taste for the tick?
I wonder what my wife would say if I started spraying the kids down with brake cleaner on our next camping trip?
 
I hate ticks. Has Rocky Mountain spotted fever 3 times. Hard to get over if you ever do. Bug juice will melt leeches into a gooey mess
 
@vtcnc :)
I have a long history of fairly extreme chemical warfare on insects, particularly blood-sucking kinds that want to leave a person with malaria, and much else.

In Botswana, I had this nightly ritual to clear the rondawel of mosquitos. I would ensure all the mosquito screens were closed. Sleep under a net, etc. I hated the green slow-burn pyrethrum incense spirals. The mozzies seemed to fly on unharmed, regardless I hit them with direct blast from the spray can. Then one day I grabbed a can, blasted it, and the insect started to lose altitude immediately, crashing to a stop. I looked at the can, and it was collar spray starch! About 10,000x as effective as anything else one could buy! From that point on, I got way more aggressive with what I would take on insects with.

You can't go anywhere in that bush without collecting ticks, though I managed not to let any get to my skin. Getting them out of the clothes was easiest done with a drop of 105 Octane Aviation AVGas.

Tsetse flies were harder to lose. Painful, and they cause trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness). The list goes on. My ultimate deterrents were extreme solvent hydrocarbons, poisoned vaseline, boiling water (on larvae), and fire!

[Edit: I forgot Bayer 70 to take out the little snails on water hyacinth near the shores of dams I would sail on. These would propagate bilharzia. Bloody fluke worms that get in your blood! ]
 
Have you guys ever used a tick key to remove ticks? does it even work? $14 for a key o_O

They work, sometimes. So do a few credit card like cards with slots, sometimes. Mountain Equipment coop sells them for under 10 bucks IIRC.

But I still use $3 tweezers because they work for every size of tick. The slot of the tick key is too wide to properly pinch small ticks to grab them and flip them out.

DO NOT use anything on ticks like acetone, oils, of other nonsense. Dont use your nails to pull out ticks you filthy animals... you're full of germs.

Once the tick is out immediately soak the wound in alcohol, use a cotton swab and scrub the wound clean. That will kill any lyme disease causing bacteria. Then dress the wound with anti-bacterial ointment and pray.

Lone star ticks are now in Ontario, and frankly if one ever bit me I'd have to consider medically assisted dying, living without red meat is torture. I can't live without red meat. I have an auto-immune disorder that makes it a virtual certainty that I'd develop an allegic reaction from exposure to alpha-gal molecule in the lone star tick. I already live on antihistamines because I have overactive mast cells
 
It's still alive and kicking... t

How much oxygen does a tick need? I had it in sealed mason jar. Time for an alcohol bath?

tick.PNG
 
When I remove a tick, I place it on a piece of scotch tape and then fold the tape over it. None has escaped that entombment.
 
I wonder what my wife would say if I started spraying the kids down with brake cleaner on our next camping trip?
I had to take WD-40 showers down at the Sunpapers plant to remove the ink off of my body and hair . You talk about a mess ! o_O
 
It's still alive and kicking... t

How much oxygen does a tick need? I had it in sealed mason jar. Time for an alcohol bath?
21% of the gas in the jar is oxygen. The size of a tick metabolism is tiny.
I don't know how ticks and suchlike do their energy exchange, but I think it may not be like humans do with lungs and expelling CO2.
It might be OK for weeks, who knows. They can't survive without moisture.

Cockroaches survive airline flights in the unpressurized undercarriage cavities, and it does not seem to bother them.
At 40,000 ft the pressure is only about 2.7psi and temperature -56°C (-70F)
Solvents, on the other hand, will cut through the oily film on their body casing. Acetone?
 
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