If you live in deer country, you live in tick country. And because you have dogs, that’s a problem. It can actually be a bigger problem for your own health. But if you’ve hesitated to spray your yard or property to
If you live in deer country, you live in tick country. And because you have dogs, that’s a problem. It can actually be a bigger problem for your own health. But if you’ve hesitated to spray your yard or property to keep ticks away because of the pesticides required, you’ll have a new option in a couple of years.
While testing a fungus for agricultural purposes, researchers discovered that it also kills blacklegged ticks, known as “deer ticks.” Metarhizium anisopliae is a natural soil fungus. One of the reasons it can be used as a yard spray is that it doesn’t affect beneficial creatures, such as earthworms, green lacewings and bees.
Connecticut might be called the deer tick capital of the U.S., and that’s why trials of the fungus were done there by Kirby C. Stafford III, Ph.D., vice director and chief entomologist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven. Stafford has studied a variety of methods for reducing ticks (Ixodes scapularis), and thus human exposure to Lyme disease, babesiosis (a malaria-like disease) and anaplasmosis (called ehrlichiosis in dogs). He literally wrote the handbook on ticks – the “Tick Management Handbook: An Integrated Guide for Homeowners, Pest Control Operators, and Public Health Officials for the Prevention of Tick-Associated Disease” – available on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website.
Stafford says the fungus “will provide an alternative for people who do not wish to use chemical insecticides,” Stafford says. “Here in the northeast, there’s a growing organic land-care movement. There haven’t been a lot of options for people who want to control ticks organically.”
The tradeoff, he says, is that while it will be effective, it won’t be “quite as effective” as available pesticides.
The CDC reports that 20,000 to 30,000 people contract Lyme disease each year in the U.S. Including “probable cases,” those numbers jumped to 30,000 to nearly 40,000 cases between 2008 through 2010. If you’ve ever known someone with Lyme disease, you know how difficult it is to diagnose, treat and manage. If treated soon after exposure with antibiotics, recovery is likely. However, 10 to 20 percent of people go on to have post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome with persistent or recurring symptoms.
While we can easily use preventives on our dogs, our only defense is to spray our skin with DEET, wear boots, long 