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Comment by layoutIfNeeded | Hacker News Reader

Why don’t we make ticks extinct?

That's a good question. Here in Latvia they actually make any walk in long grass somewhat problematic, as well as letting animals like dogs inside for whatever reason.

I actually got lyme disease a few years ago - had a period of pretty lethargic behaviour and noticeable joint pain. Blood work helped figure out its presence in my body and a course of antibiotics thankfully made me better.

Now, i'm not precisely sure about the long term symptoms, since me having occasional memory problems, insomnia and depression/anxiety all might be unrelated to it, but some people definitely get such symptoms and even worse ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#Late_disseminated...

After malaria and mosquitoes have been properly addressed, it would be nice to collectively work on ticks.

I think a better long-term solution that would have less cascading effects would be a cure for Lyme Diseases and the accompanying symptoms that follow years afterwards. Sorry you had to go through such a brutal disease. I've seen what it can do to people in the long-term and it can be devastating

But it would requi.re such advanced medicine that doesn't exist today. Although I'm all for tick pest control (up to a certain point).

Hey, if there are ways to vaccinate either the carriers of certain diseases, the people who'd get affected by them, or even cure those that have gotten ill, i think it's definitely worthwhile to research it further!

I guess that's how we ended up with vaccines for rabies being airdropped from planes, which sounds a bit silly, but is a really interesting approach to attempting to solve a similar problem for populations of wild animals: https://globalnews.ca/news/5782966/rabies-vaccine-bait-drop-...

Though i'm not entirely sure how viable doing something along those same lines would be for ticks. I do recall, however, reading about attempts to genetically alter mosquitoes to make them more resistant to malaria, so that its spread would be limited: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/enginee...

Maybe an approach like that could be viable for other types of diseases as well, without necessarily exterminating the populations of carriers, rather simply releasing modified specimens into the wild and letting them propagate the modifications through natural means.

Well, while I am fine with trying to make some infectious diseases to become extinct, I would be careful here, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign. In any case, apparently somebody else wondered about that too: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/wkyax/if_we_cou...

However, it's conceivable that in the future we will figure out how to carry out large-scale vaccinations of tics, so we eradicate certain diseases from them before they are transmitted to humans.

Doesn't change anything to be honest. Any parasite should be eradicated regardless of whether it is infectious or not.

Much as I don't like ticks (and I really don't), I feel we should be extraordinarily careful before deliberately eliminating any species - they're almost certainly not the sole food source of anything, but even being a significant one might cause ripple effects. Plus, for all that they cause this and other problems when they bite us, it's not impossible that some of them trigger protective immune effects in some of the animals they bite, for example.

I think the solution needs to be some combination of getting much better at permanently modulating immune responses post-exposure and finding a method to avoid this extreme response.

Unfortunately, given the relative scarcity of these ticks and the newness of the condition, I would anticipate very little funding directly going toward finding a solution for it unless some ultrarich person takes it on as a cause du jour, or it comes "for free" with some other discoveries about immune modulation.

One could kill the ticks that spread human disease while leaving the vast majority that don’t.

I'm completely with you on this.

I believe treating the disease is better than eliminating species with cascading effects we don't entirely understand.

But it seems like killing ticks is much, much easier than completely curing a disease, so it's a short-term solution people approach instead. Not an ideal paradigm in my opinion.

Would love to live in a world where parasites live in the ecosystem, but we're utterly immune to them, as opposed to a world with no parasites.

Or use insect repellent when hiking? We already make enough species extinct unwillingly. I don't think it's a good idea to start extinguishing any species that bothers us. Where do you draw the line?

Insect repellent doesn't adequately repel ticks.

permethrin is a contact neurotoxin that will kill or repel most insects. I treat my hiking clothes with it if I’m going into tick country. I’ve actually watched ticks scurry away and die after they make contact with treated clothing. It kills mosquitoes equally effectively.

It’s really bad for fish though so I don’t use it all the time.

If you use repellents, the tick keeps climbing and gets behind your ears or in your hair.

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