Static electricity attracts ticks to hosts | Hacker News Reader

Static electricity attracts ticks to hosts

bristol.ac.uk

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The videos of ticks flying through the air are here:

https://phys.org/news/2023-06-static-electricity-hosts-scien...

Totally worth watching.

Key take-away for me: Don't wear statically charged clothes in wooded areas.

They walk just like headcrabs in half life, absolutely revolting

At least with headcrabs you know where you stand. Either it kills you, it gets you killed, it turns you into a zombie, or you miraculously survive.

With ticks there is that awful, wait-for-a-red-ring-to-appear-in-the-next-few-weeks phase. Oh a tick? Yeah, you're probably fine; although there is a tiny yet non-negligible chance you're health will be ruined.

Also, try hitting a tick with a crowbar. You can hardly see the little buggers.

Haha you can always send a tick to the lab and start a course of amoxicillin preemptively. But it does get a bit expensive when your kids start picking them up every other week. Unfortunately the rates of Lyme disease in many areas aren't "tiny", it's at least double digit percentages of deer ticks that are carriers.

> Key take-away for me: Don't wear statically charged clothes in wooded areas.

Isn't that most outdoor clothing? Fleece, polyester, wool, etc.

Discharge it as much as possible before going into wooded areas, I guess?

Is it plausible to have some gadget that sets you up with a reverse charge that pushes the little buggers away? I'd buy that.

Just more nightmare fuel about ticks. Thanks for that, researchers!

But more info is also needed -- is this only to positive, or negative static charge? or both? If you're walking with your furry cat it's ok, but not if you've got a glass hiking pole?

This might explain a bit about their preference for dry weather. Living in Minnesota, with dogs and kids, these little bastards are hated almost as much as mosquitoes.

My SO's senses are focused on the sense of smell and she swears that increased tick activity in an area is associated with a distinct smell - she picked-up so many ticks during childhood that it's a miracle that she didn't get Lyme disease so I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt in this case.

In light of this research it's possible that the smell in question is that of dry foliage/soil.

> she picked-up so many ticks during childhood that it's a miracle that she didn't get Lyme disease so I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt in this case.

Remember how Spider-Man got his super powers after being bitten by a radioactive spider?

Now I’m not saying that your SO definitely has super powers. But..

I live in Massachusetts where ticks are prevalent and a high percentage of them are known to carry Lyme disease. Perhaps more than 35% of them. I’ve had dozens of ticks on me and at least a dozen of those have started feeding before I noticed them. About six or seven managed to feed overnight before I noticed them.

Thankfully, I’ve never gotten Lyme. However, one of my friends did. Half of his face was paralyzed by the time he found out.

From my experience, I can say that while the consequences are severe, the chance of infection seems to be pretty low. Either that or I’m just extremely lucky. Perhaps I would be an outlier in the data. Or perhaps immunity to Lyme is more common than we realize. Part of me is surprised that I only know one person with Lyme.

Either way, my advice to everyone is to be vigilant but not overly afraid. You can be an outdoorsy person for many years in one of the most Lyme infested areas and be fine. Just be sure to check yourself at regular intervals, especially before AND after sleeping. The risk goes up the longer the tick stays on you, particularly once the tick starts getting full. The rule of thumb I’ve always heard is that if you get the tick off within 4 hours, you should be fine.

My friend who got Lyme never noticed any ticks that summer, but his symptoms developed within a month of a camping trip, so that’s probably how he got it. Noticing them is so important, because they are stealthy.

Last year, there was a day when I found five ticks on me all at once, just from going through the front yard to get the mail. I felt one of them crawling on me after going inside. Again, be vigilant, you won’t usually feel them. If you do feel one, there may be others. In addition to the five on me, I found two more on the floor, which had probably fallen off of my clothing. Most of the year it isn’t that bad. Although, a group of them is actually easier to notice.

Does this mean generating a specific electrostatic field could repel ticks?

Or guide them into traps?

> Or guide them into traps?

It sounds like this is more of a phenomenon they exploit to get on to hosts, as in literally pulled on by static electricity.

Just get chickens

Man I’m so glad I live somewhere with few if any ticks. They sound horrible from everything I’ve read.

Fortunately, tick-borne diseases aside, they are probably about a 2 on a scale from 1=non-disease-carrying mosquitoes to 10=guinea worms.

You don't notice when you've been bitten, and if you get into the habit of checking yourself all over before bedtime, you can usually remove them fairly easily with alcohol. The risk is leaving bits and pieces behind when you pull them off, which is why you want to encourage them to let go on their own.

> The risk is leaving bits and pieces behind when you pull them off, which is why you want to encourage them to let go on their own.

I thought the reason was if you accidentally apply pressure to the engorged tick, it backflows the potentially lyme-contaminated blood into your person.

They sell special tweezers which engage the head while avoiding the body for this reason AIUI.

IIRC the recommended approach now is to freeze them off with those wart removers you can find at drug stores. Even the special tweezers were hard enough to use properly that it's no longer the recommended approach.

'How to handle those bloody potentially life-ruining ticks properly' is something that seems to change rather frequently. Quite annoying, despite the fact that improvements in that area are welcome.

Any definite source? Pulling them out is usually easy.. but not always, if freezing them off is feasible and better would like to try, but this thread now has already the bad alcohol recommendation :/ so would like to make sure not just hearsay?

Good question. I've read a lot of local news here in New England in the last year that recommends freezing, but looking up formal sources... it isn't so simple. Seems like freezing means you still end up using tweezers for the removal, but the risk of pushing toxins back into your bloodstream is lessened because the toxins themselves are frozen inside the tick.

So I guess the recommendation remains: remove with tweezers carefully, targeting the head so as to avoid sqeezing the body and flushing toxins back into your body. Which is easier than heading to a drugstore for freezing wart removers anyway.

There’s also a tool called a tick twister that is supposed to get them around the neck and twist them out. Like flat tweezers that you slide along your skin so you don’t accidentally squeeze the body. If I understand correctly they have flexible spines/barbs on their head which is what can keep the head in if you pull without twisting. When you twist the spines lay down and so the tick slips right out intact. That’s the marketing behind the tool anyway.

https://www.ticktwister.com/

Yes, my wife pulled one out with an "approved tool" but it left a bit off the fangs or whatever in unfortunately. Went to the doctor and to my surprise she said: I won't fumble now and do anything there, the important thing is the body/gut is gone, this is unimportant, just lets disinfect it and watch for lime. shrug

Yes, but the tick-borne diseases turn it into 7-8. Lyme disease is awful.

Lyme isn't even the worst thing you can get from ticks. If you really want to scare yourself, read up on Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Powassan virus, Ehrlichiosis, etc. etc.

I've never been able to get a tick off with alcohol.

The trick is to use alcohol on tick, not on yourself.

Joking aside I think alcohol was supposed to be just for disinfecting and some people took it wrong way ?

The disinfecting part is relatively new in the human history.

Me neither, and I've got many ticks a lot of times.

The trick is to grab them near the skin, without using too much force, and pull them with the minimum amount of force that works (go increasing the force until they move).

People using tweezers also invariably do it wrong, because tweezers are not an instrument for delicately handling things.

Mosquitoes are super awful already and turn what would be an 8/10 outdoor experience into a 5/10.

We seriously need to find a way to get rid of biting insects on a grand scale.

I used to hate mosquitoes, but then I travelled to New Zealand and met the sandflies, and now I'm glad we only have mosquitoes where I live.

We need to get rid of these either, and also of horse-flies.

Totally no reason to have any of these around. Any ecological niches they are taking should be left to those who do not prey on human.

Do absolutely not "encourage them to let go on their own". When discovered use tweezers or a tick-removal tool to remove it as soon as possible. Make sure to pull as close to the skin as possible.

All old folk-remedy things with butter and alcohol only risks the tick to go into shock and spew saliva into you, increasing the risk for lyme disease/tbe or borrelia.

Just pull it straight out, it's safe and easy, done it a dozen times.

Also get vaccine for lyme disease if you are in an area where ticks pass it on, it is a horribly crippling disease and not worth the risk however low.

I don't think there's any Lyme disease vaccine available for humans, at least not in the US.

I take apple flavored ivermectin meant for horses sometimes. So any horse vaccines available?

You meant encephalitis vaccine , Lyme disease does not have approved vaccine but can be healed with antibiotics if noticed on time. I got encephalitis vaccine as I live in country that is one of the top countries where people get tick borne diseases.

The saliva injection occurs when the tick attaches. It's accompanied by an anesthetic that keeps you from noticing it in most cases. [1]

Admittedly, there are a lot of articles saying "Don't try to suffocate or irritate the tick before pulling it out." They are written by doctors who have never actually had a tick bite. Once the tick is firmly attached, which takes several hours, you will often be unable to remove it cleanly without chemical assistance of one sort or another.

We used coal-tar ointment (ichthammol) for that back in the day [2]. Some say alcohol works just as well, others say differently. The suggestion elsewhere in the thread to freeze them off with wart remover sounds like it could work well. For me personally, the ultimate remedy was G'ing TFO of that part of the country.

1: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcimb.2017.0028...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_bituminosulfonate

My grandma pulled out thousands of ticks by wetting a piece of cloth, putting a bit of soap on it and turning them counter-clockwise.

Interestingly, you need to turn them clockwise for ages before they let go, but counter-clockwise gets them out after a single rotation.

She did get both lyme disease and encephalitis (mostly spread in Central Europe), but she did spend ~70 years foraging for blueberries and mushrooms..

I also do it (but probably on hundreds not thousands) and never caught anything.

Does that mean we can use the opposite charge to repel them?

That's interesting, and a bit surprising. Peak tick activity in the US coincides with outdoor activity in times and places where you're doing a lot of sweating, and are more or less at equipotential with the ground. I suppose they could be attracted first to dry clothing, then to skin nearby, though.

And dog ticks obviously wouldn't face the same problem, since they produce minimal sweat through their fur.

I think ticks are mostly attracted by the CO2 in breath of animals. As in, they drop themselves from trees when an animal/person is breathing below them.

Ticks dropping from trees is the childhood myth that will make me also always forever fear walking under low trees, but ticks neither jump nor go high up on trees, usually. I almost believe you don't meant that seriously ;), otherwise nowadays there are more "debunk" stories out there than ticks probably, just google it.

See also this video for where and how you find ticks easily: https://youtu.be/igBfTmRQ8-U

Some mosquitos iirc let them guide by CO2 gradients..

What shoe materials are good at generating static electricity and which shoe materials are poor?

> Ticks can be attracted across air gaps several times larger than themselves by the static electricity that their hosts naturally accumulate

So always keep a good contact with the ground to dissipate the excess electricity. /s

(There are good TBE vaccines already.)

Valneva/Pfizer are developing a Lyme disease vaccine, VLA15:

https://valneva.com/research-development/lyme-disease/

It's being widely tested in many US/EU locales.

15k people in the small south-eastern region of Sweden where I live have already gotten the shot 3 times, as an example. There are about 50 such test regions, so the testing is quite wide already.

The current plan calls for general availability in US/EU in 2026. Before May the plan was 2025.

Gives a new meaning to “touch grass” phrase!

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