November 2022: How to Kill Vampire Ticks Instantly

Yes, ticks are vampires. They need blood to progress from larva to nymph to adult and then for females to lay eggs. They can drink so much blood in one meal that they increase their weight several hundred times. Once engorged, they release their mouth attachments and fall off the host and progress to their next life stage.Ticks, depending on the species, can have up to three different hosts during a lifetime. Their complicated mouthparts—the hypostome, chelicera, and palp—allow the tick to attach and feed on animals and humans.The mouth of a tick. (Photo by the National Institutes of Health)Like most insects, ticks probably have some benefits in nature, but I am hard-pressed to name any. They do, however, excel at spreading diseases between species. The list of infectious diseases they can transmit is impressive, and diseases such as babesiosis, Powassan virus disease, anaplasmosis, ehrlichiosis, hard tick relapsing fever, and tularemia are not part of my day-to-day differential diagnoses list. Ticks are much more well-known for being transmitters of diseases such as Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.I was recently removing a tick from the helix of a child's ear, and I sprayed the tick with a vapocoolant to minimize the removal discomfort to my patient. We were surprised that the tick seemed to have been killed almost instantly by the vapocoolant, Pain Ease (Gebauer). This piqued my interest and prompted a review of the literature on freezing to manage ticks. ...
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