Wow one more weird reason to fear ticks. I wonder why ticks are such effective disease vectors.
You can still eat poultry and fish if you have it. You just can't eat mammals. As someone who's mostly zero-carb, I find it scary too, but it's not a total catastrophe.
It's more their reputation as a disease vector that scares me. We don't have very many ticks in NZ, and currently (let's see what climate change brings) no insect disease vectors, so not at all used to them.
I suspect you're not worried about them for the same reason I'm not worried about bovine TB - you know how to handle it.