Tick-killing pill shows promising results in human trial
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I got into archery during covid and would haul a target out onto some grasslands and shoot. My buddy and I would pull half a dozen ticks off ourselves at the end. I'd find ticks half dead on my car dash the next day.
We bought "tick pants". Pants coated in some chemical that does something like this. Tuck them into our boots.
No more ticks.
Clothes coated in this drug seems like a good alternative to actually consuming the drug in my opinion.
Also I've been trying to spot a tick in the wild before it grabs me and have never done it. I want to see a "questing" tick, ie one that is holding on to the edge of a blade of grass with its arms out trying to grab something.
If you are in an area that you suspect might have a lot of ticks. Look at the tips of any grass stems for a little brown/black spot. They climb as high as they can and then kinda "stand up" and put their "arms" up and out and wait for something to touch them. Then it's off to the races to climb as high as they can... on you. They stop once they hit an obstacle they can't easily get around and dig in.
I spray my shoes with permethrin. That seems to almost totally eliminate climbers as I'm not walking through tall grass. You know they've gotten a deadly dose when they start walking in circles. I don't feel bad for them. My doctor told me that 85% of ticks in my area are positive for Lyme.
Once they reach your hair (unless you shave clean), even good luck may not be enough, very hard to spot and almost impossible alone
Mirrors or camera phones are handy.
I live in places where lyme is barely 5% incidence, and even that not everywhere. If it would be like 80% like some mention, doing week-long hikes alone would be outright suicidal. Better chances for retirement in base jumping.
I found two deer ticks (one attached) last fall. I always wear long pants and they’d just climb up till past my waist. They’re quite small.
They gave me one dose of antibiotics as a preventative. I worry about our dog. She got the vaccine and has some medicine that kills then, but I still found three on her.
Interestingly, a "questing" tick has been found to be able to cross air gaps by leveraging static electricity:
“We have now discovered that ticks can be lifted across air gaps several times larger than themselves by the static electricity that other animals naturally build up. This makes it easier for them to find and attach onto animals that they want to latch onto and feed from.
Kills ticks but also kills cats, so be careful. I have heard that once it is dry, it isn't a threat to your little furry friend, but I still won't risk it.
Seems there are a couple of chemicals that act as anti-tick. We're using Seresto collars for our two dogs (no ticks in a decade of usage), which seems to be using Imidacloprid (anti-fleas) and Flumethrin (anti-ticks).
So at least there seems to be two ingredients, there are probably more.
But nice to see we’re finally getting for humans what pets have had for a while for ticks.
We began treating our boots with diesel to try to repel them. That worked to a point. It didn't take long to reveal the shortcoming in that method - diesel fuel soaks through the leather and easily enters the skin. It ruins the boot leather and burns your skin so that wearing anything on your feet is very painful so we abandoned that method.
After looking at options we decided to use cattle ear tags because each cow only uses one and it keeps them tick-free. After reading all the warnings about safe handling - wear gloves, avoid skin contact, potential reproductive harm, cancer risk, etc. - we decided that it made no difference. We realized that this had to be absorbed through the cow's bloodstream from the puncture on the ear and since every cow we had ever seen had an ear tag, this meant that this chemical was present in every steak or burger we had ever eaten so wearing one long enough to complete the part of the survey with the tick problem wasn't going to increase our risk of any adverse effects.
We bought a pack of tags and each hung one on a boot and never had another tick.
I don't have any known health issues to report here 40 years later. Totally anecdotal information from what is likely to have been a low-dose, short duration exposure event.
That’s what the medicated pet collars do.
Part of the advantage of collar-absorption is that you can use a molecule that readily breaks down/inactivates in digestion. And avoid sharp peaks in blood levels.
Tough woman. She is missed.
Not sure how true it is, but the marketing for the collars we use claims that eventually the chemicals spreads to protect the full body, even if the collar is just around the neck.
and how do you manage this?
AFAIK there has only been one documented case of it killing a kitten and it drank the liquid form, unknown quantity. Baby animals do not yet have fully formed livers to metabolize the sodium channel blocker. Insects on the other hand do not have a liver. They use body fat to detoxify but it isn't fast enough or volumetric enough to handle the sodium channel blocker in large amounts relative to their size.
Study of 286 cat/permethrin cases in London: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1016/j.jfms.2007.05...
Study of 750 cases in Australia: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1016/j.jfms.2009.12...
...we don't track this stuff nearly as well for pets as we do for humans but seems to have pretty robust evidence of toxicity.
I have two cats and we haven’t had any issues that I could see.
I make 100% sure they can never be exposed to it when it’s wet, but they’ve been around me in treated clothing, escaped the house and walked through treated (dry) grass, been around dogs that have been treated with it, etc.
Given the number of people that have cats and dogs living together who are treating their dogs with it monthly, it seems relatively safe if used properly and cautiously.
https://www.amazon.ca/OnGuard-Pro-Perm-Residual-Non-Flammabl...
I just pulled one [dug in] that I assume got on me meters away from a fully eaten deer carcass :/
Tweezed it out best I could, H2O2'd and lightly cauterized it then Neosporin'd, but still gonna have to play the bullseye waiting game AFAIK...
Got dang ticks!
https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/resources/FS-Guidance-for-Clinician...
Of course, these antibiotics are not without risk too.
It would be nice to see support for natural consumption of ticks by fowl (chickens, turkeys, quail, etc), marsupial, etc.
What exactly are you correcting here?
Therr are also other tick borne illnesses that can be quite dangerous.
Hell, I live as far north as you can go in New England, and I've found ticks on my feet after grilling dinner in my backyard. At some point I just do not care to don my anti-tick hazmat suit every time I do anything outside.
I find a ton of ticks around where I live and have experienced a questing tick by pulling them off of my dog before they attach and then carrying them on something. Sure you're not spotting them naturally but they will quest when given the freedom to do so. If you don't kill them immediately but put them on a leaf or something they will crawl to an end of it and start! If you're just interested in seeing how it looks
Not one bit or attached to any member of our family. And, we had plenty of kids in the low teens around the house. In fact, it was so "OK" to see ticks, that none of the adults made a fuss about them - so we grew up never being paranoid about them - in contrast to most of my east coast friends with kids
I have a hard time understanding how a tick bites a fully grown adult in summer weather. Of course if you are wrapped in massive layers of clothing and you can't see it coming at you, its something different.
Protip: If you take your city dog abroad -particularly a tropical area outside of the country- make sure your dog is very well tick-protected. East/West coast dogs can't handle foreign tick diseases. They don't have built-in inmunities. It only takes 1 tick from a farm/field you visited to give a deadly disease to your best friend.
Watch for long grass along deer trails. During a particularly bad tick year (Wisconsin) I could walk along the deer trail by our swamp and just count the ticks hanging out on the ends of the green swamp grass. I did not spend much time outside that spring.
Unfortunately one of them was a deer tick that dug into my armpit, so now I'm playing the "wait and see if it's Lyme" game :(
And doing "tick checks" when you come inside your home is a habit here. Getting them off you fast is the best way to keep from getting lyme disease.
And either burning off or grinding up and piling up all the leaves to make compost this time of year is the best way to get them out of your yard.
I learned this the hard way. Here's a video of how bad they can get here and one of my first attempts at trying to get rid of them. It didn't really work very well:
I have never seen anything like that up here in New England. That towel has more ticks on it than I've seen in my life, and we're not exactly a low-Lyme area.
Good luck!
Since then I've ground up the leaves this time of year and pile them up to compost them. In spring and summer I bag grass clippings and stuff those into the pile of composting leaves and it's amazing how hot those clippings get. Hot enough to roast any ticks in there for sure. So for the past few years we've had almost no ticks at all during the warm season. And I haven't had to use any pesticides.
If you find a possum in your yard, leave ‘em be and count yourself lucky.
We also have a lot of deer here and they carry ticks that get huge on them, so they're spreading them around wherever they go. We're surrounded on 3 sides by Army Corp land that's forest and filled with critters that spread them around.
I'd never seen a Golden Eagle before and it is by far the biggest bird I've ever seen. They're huge! I yelled at it and waved my arms (trying to look big) and it finally let go and flew off.
I’m glad Lyme disease wasn’t as pervasive when I was a kid. At 2+ tick bites a day, every day, all summer, we couldn’t have beat those odds.
Most of the older generation of anti-tick meds have pretty substantial side effects and poor efficacy.
I've had dogs all my life and live in a very tick-prone area. Nothing ever really worked, to be honest. It was a constant battle of attrition. I had to spray the house with nasty chemicals every few months cause that was pretty much the only thing that kind of tipped the balance against the ticks. I frankly don't know how we didn't get Lyme disease, we were exposed for decades.
Since these new meds appeared, ticks have completely disappeared from our property. They only provide 1-3 months of protection, but they're so effective at eradicating the parasite population that I've only had to use 3 pills in the past 4 years.
I grew up on a island with a lot of ticks. Being a kid and spending time on fields and in forests, we constantly had to remove ticks before heading home.
But now 2 decades later, visiting the island again as an adult and expecting having to do the same after walking around the forest, we didn't find a single tick on ourselves, when it would easily have been a couple of ticks each in the before-days.
So many parameters being different though, so hard to reach any conclusion, maybe my blood is less attractive, maybe we weren't physically intensive enough, maybe the wrong season, but maybe there are other chemicals at play too that wasn't there before.
https://www.fda.gov/animal-veterinary/animal-health-literacy...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7738705/
The consolidated FDA, Project Jake and EMA findings (Table 8) showed notable differences between survey populations regarding the percentage of neurological toxicity and serious AE, and fatal effects. Statistical analysis of these serious AE showed highly significant differences between the findings of the Project Jake survey and those reported by the FDA and EMA. While the number of death and seizure AE reported by the EMA was 7 to 10 times higher than those reported to the FDA, the reported responses for the Project Jake survey for death and seizures fell in between those of the FDA and EMA but aligned more closely with the EMA results. Furthermore, the number of reported death and seizure AE for lotilaner and spinosad were considerably higher than suggested with respect to their product labelling for potential neurological effects (Table 2 and and8).8).
But yes, the drug is "generally" safe for use. It's still worth being aware of the potential risks.
It links to a corrigendum adding a conflict of interest disclosure stating
> A Class Action lawsuit related to the use and safety of isoxazoline parasiticides was filed on December 27, 2019 in New Jersey, while this manuscript was undergoing peer review. One of the article's co‐authors, Valerie Palmieri, is the Plaintiff. [PALMIERI, et al. v. INTERVET INC, Case No. .2:19‐cv‐22024‐JMV‐AME (D. N. J.).]”
#1: Authorship is a big one, and the conflict of interest developing during the review process shows that these are not disinterested researchers.
#2: The type of study is a nearly worthless type, in that it has no real statistical control and is just asking people to report on things on the internet. What ends up happening with these studies is that people self-recruit by word of mouth. Survey respondents may have been asked by other participants to register adverse events, and survey respondents may have never given the medication to a pet or seen an adverse event. There is no controlling for that apparent in the study.
#3: The survey instrument is supposed to be in the appendix and it is not, yet it is not described. Their recruitment process is described only as "distributed electronically by mail throughout the United States to veterinarians, veterinary clients, pet caregivers/owners, kennel club groups and on social media sites between August 1 and 31, 2018." There are lots of complaints about the adverse-event reporting system, the worst is that adverse events are merely enumerated from reports and there is no real way to put them into a statistical study. This is just getting another enumeration of events and putting a different denominator under them.
In my prescribing I have seen only one adverse event worth reporting: a dog was heartworm positive and received ivermectin, doxycycline and afoxolaner at the same time. It had a transient episode of low blood pressure treated with fluids. For a drug that, in their denominator, gives 80+% adverse reactions, that is very surprising. So, the study doesn't really pass the smell test.
There have been other drugs that have caused adverse reactions in significant numbers of patients. We stop using them immediately. The difference is very noticeable.
The first author is a business executive who launched a huge class-action against Merck without disclosing it in this paper, the only veterinarian in the authors has been cited for practicing without a license (https://www.ocregister.com/2021/10/26/founder-of-hemopet-in-...) and the senior author is an orthopedic surgeon with no relation to the field and has maybe one other publication.
Come on, this is not a serious paper.
Take from that what you want. It's anecdotal and non-scientific. But it concerns me enough that we keep our dogs on Nexgard only during the peak of tick season and not year round like the vets seem to want to push.
There are also known genetic differences in dogs that cause some to find various anti-parasiticals (esp heartworm) to be toxic to some herding breeds (border collies, aus. sheperds). We had our border collies tested for this before putting them on medications. (https://vcacanada.com/know-your-pet/multidrug-resistance-mut...)
That said, genetic diversity is higher in dogs than it is in humans.
We've also had a few warmer than usual weeks this winter, and deer ticks have been out for a month now, if not longer.
I'm at the point where I'm probably going to have them on something year round.
I've only ever seen deer ticks here, never black legged, but they're definitely in the area.
She had seizures within hours of giving her the stuff, and was dead within 48 hours.
I'll happily die on this hill of looking like an internet crank ranting about drug companies, but it was a traumatizing experience for my wife and I, and even worse for our dog.
Fuck Merck, they can rot in hell.
Where I grew up, having dogs get sick from tick bites was fairly common. Ever seen a collie with its ears packed with swollen ticks? That has to be miserable. The risk of the medicine was less than the risk of the bites in our case.
We’ve had our first run ins with ticks in our suburban Chicago backyard recently. They were never an issue before, and never literally just outside the door. I’m sure the unseasonably warm start to the year is to blame.
The good thing is, we're just approaching the best time to apply tick tubes, early spring to summer.
I do wonder if we're going to end up with permethrin-resistant super ticks though.
I don't know if this has appeared in ticks but it has appeared in mosquitos.
I had the same experience the first season I tried. I moved the location around the second season and noticed they were empty after a few months.
I hide some near a wood pile, along fences underneath plants. I just ordered more. It makes me feel better even if it’s just placebo.
Ever since I found out that ticks carry a disease that makes you allergic to meat, I became extra worried about them. However, despite living in a major tick area, I've luckily never seen one. I just make it a point to wear long pants and sleeves when working in the yard and then immediately shower afterwards.
Pick a set of outerwear to be your yard work clothing. I’ve got a pair of overalls, a light long sleeve shirt, and a hat. Treat them with permethrin. This doesn’t repel ticks and mosquitos, but can actually incapacitate or kill them on contact.
Tuck your pants in your boots, and sleeves in your gloves if you’re wearing any.
Every time before you go out, spray yourself (particularly any exposed skin) with the picaridin repellent.
I live in the middle of a forest that’s sitting on wetlands. The bugs are out of control here. I haven’t found a tick on me (not in me, on me at all) in years. I also get very, very few mosquito bites.
(If you don’t want to go this crazy… just long pants tucked in and some picaridin repellent before you go out is all my wife does and she’s had similar results, though spends less time outside and less wandering through dense forest and stuff.)
"Heterorhabditis bacteriophora is a species of entomopathogenic nematode known commonly as beneficial nematodes. They are microscopic and are used in gardening as a form of biological pest control."
That's fascinating. Have you noticed any knock-on effects? E.g. fall in the number of other wildlife which might normally feed on those insects?
not 'main diet,' but can confirm free range guineas, chickens, etc help with the tick pressure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotilaner
Couldn't find a good description of mechanism of action on Wikipedia. I also have nerve cells that need to communicate and damaging them just to spite a tick seems counterproductive.
I'm surprised that similar sounding drugs are making their way to humans. I'm not a chemist and I'm not sure how similar lotilaner and flurolaner are, but damn if I'm not suspicious.
That's awful and way too young. I hope the class action has a good outcome.
And yes, it is technically a mammal neurotoxin too, although our bodies are better at compartmentalizing and managing the risk. Similarly, you don't drop dead if exposed to caffeine or nicotine, even though they are insect neurotoxins produced by plants to kill bugs.
But it cracks me up that we are flipping out about herbicides such as glyphosate or 2,5-D - both of which are plant growth regulators that have no real mechanism to cause obvious harm in animals - but we're a lot more flippant with actual animal neurotoxins such as permethrin.
"The active ingredient, nootkatone, is found in Alaska yellow cedar trees (also known as the Nootka cypress), some herbs, and citrus fruits. Biologists in CDC's Division of Vector-Borne Diseases have found nootkatone to be an effective repellent and insecticide for use against ticks and mosquitoes."
It's super effective and completely natural without any drawbacks, but apparently hard to synthesize on a commercial scale.
If drops of food laced with this kind of thing were given to deer, I'd expect it to drop the tick populations significantly. Without risk of human side effects.
That and we need to cull deer populations and encourage predators of mice generally.
Our solution was a bit of sulfur powder in the dog's food, and around the edges of the verandah, which was a home remedy suggested by the grey beards in the area. We never had any problems after that.
Pfizer currently has a Lymes vaccine study that I have some personal knowledge on that should be wrapped up in 2025: https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
> About the VALOR trial VALOR is an ongoing randomized, observer-blind, placebo-controlled Phase 3 trial which has enrolled 9,437* participants 5 years of age and older to receive VLA15 or a saline placebo (1:1 ratio). As part of the primary series, participants receive three doses of VLA15 within the first year at months 0, 2 and 5-9, and one booster dose 9-12 months after completion of the primary immunization.5 The final primary series vaccination for participants occurs just before the peak Lyme disease season for the region. Participants will be followed for the occurrence of Lyme disease. The trial is conducted at sites located in areas where Lyme disease is highly endemic across the U.S., Canada and Europe and has enrolled volunteers with a cleared past infection with Borrelia burgdorferi as well as Borrelia burgdorferi naïve volunteers.
There is lab data suggesting an interaction between LYMErix and certain genotypes potentially inducing arthritis, but the initial trial and post market surveillance data did not show any meaningfully elevated arthritis rates. However, post market surveillance was definitely hampered by the limited market uptake, fueled partly by the side effect concern.
Genetic testing/screening should be significantly cheaper today, and the higher prevalence of ticks as a concern would probably mean that LYMErix could probably be a viable product today, even if its arthritis side effect profile was real, as long as it was combined with screening.
> Despite the lack of evidence that the complaints were caused by the vaccine, sales plummeted and LYMErix was withdrawn from the U.S. market by GlaxoSmithKline in February 2002, in the setting of negative media coverage and fears of vaccine side effects. The fate of LYMErix was described in the medical literature as a "cautionary tale"; an editorial in Nature cited the withdrawal of LYMErix as an instance in which "unfounded public fears place pressures on vaccine developers that go beyond reasonable safety considerations." The original developer of the OspA vaccine at the Max Planck Institute told Nature: "This just shows how irrational the world can be ... There was no scientific justification for the first OspA vaccine LYMErix being pulled.
https://www.businessinsider.com/acquired-tick-resistance-why...
https://www.statnews.com/2023/07/31/acquired-tick-resistance...
That would be a superpower worth having. Perhaps a vaccine could confer this sort of immunity to us non-resistant folks?
That would kill off deer ticks really quickly.
Supposedly essential oils also kill ticks. I bought some yard sprays in addition to getting some tick hunting birds.
I think this serves as a good reminder that folks should be aware of common tick procedures like checking at the end of a walk if you have any and knowing how to remove them carefully (you don't just pull them, you have to get the mouthpiece out - tweezers are recommended).
I've already had a tick bite this year from a walk in Marin county which is quite early. Fortunately, I felt it bite me and was able to remove it quickly.
It's also worth noting you can get ticks tested for Lyme disease but it's about $40.
Tick tubes are toilet paper rolls filled with permethrin soaked cotton balls. Rodents collect the cotton balls to use as nesting material which kills the nymph ticks that live on them before they can mature into adults. You put then out in early spring and again in summer. You can either make them yourself (much cheaper) or buy them ready made.
Nobody wrote me back. If you are studying malaria and are interested in this approach, please run with it. I won't be sore.
The next iteration should be a pill that causes ticks to avoid humans altogether.
Bonus points if there were a pill that also causes mosquitos to avoid humans.
That's news to me.
I've seen it happen multiple times, once to myself.
Here's a couple pictures next to a ruler and a penny to show how tiny the tick was:
I know there's also a much higher risk of contracting diseases if you can't remove the tick in a careful way. If you smoosh it, or otherwise cause it enough distress that it regurgitates while still attached to you, that will also increase your chances.
If you live in tick areas, get a tick kit, people. They're cheap. Don't do what my dad did and use pliers.
These two statements contradict each other.
Most tick bites take 36-48 hours before you get infected (bell hump). But sometimes you get infected quickly (left tail) and sometimes it takes longer (right tail).
If you are outdoorsy type, this is should be around top of your list, just like knowing inside & out of say various mosquito-borne diseases and their spread vectors when traveling around.
Surely they could have given the treatment to ticks rather than humans? :)
Here in central europe ticks are a massive problem. Lyme's caused serious year long health issues for a family member. It also almost killed my dog when he caught one of his first ticks ever.
I also do "checks", avoid tall grasses and have the whole system for management of my family's "tick security" (sometimes with their complain in the background). However, studying this problem basically every single summer I once found the alternative explanation as to why tick population today explodes globally in moderate climates.
Collapsed deer predator population[0]. Deer and small rodent populations are unchecked because predators can't thrive in ecologically stressed areas (There's little to no wild forests of enough of the size for wolf in most of Europe). Herbivores had far easier time adapting to the transformed environment compared to their natural predators. They also get less hunted by humans, obviously.
[0] https://hal.science/hal-03015707/document (ctrl+f > "tick")
No amount of DEET will solve that. There's also no need to CRISP'r anything or spend a decade of research on poor quality vaccination. This is system's fragility problem.
Then again... ticks were a very common occurrence for the first settlers in North America. There're diary entries mentioning them "in swarms" explicitly. But, what's different today is that you don't need to be even close to a deer trail to get 23 ticks of your dog after the walk.
Our trips to the woods looked like a visit to a BSL-4 lab. Tightly buttoned shirts, long sleeves, checking each other after a visit, etc.
Fuck ticks.
What about the vaccine that was near approval a few decades ago?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powassan_virus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Mountain_spotted_fever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tularemia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babesiosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha-gal_syndrome
Couldn't you just take it a few days before you go camping or hiking each time?
So far I have success keeping the grass short, discouraging deer on the property (tick magnets), and keeping the (two) dogs on Nexgard.
If they got worse, I'd get myself some guinea fowl to annoy the neighbours with.
there was an actual ready to go vaccine for Lyme, LYMERix, which was pulled because it was not profitable. That's the problem there, which is that vaccines should be made available even if they are not "profitable".
Who knows what effect this has on signals between our own nerve cells. Yikes.
Personally I would not try this in a long lasting formulation, only something oral that washes out completely in a few hours, unless it had been on the market for quite a long time
See e.g.: https://parkinsonscare.org.uk/pesticides-and-herbicides/
But on the other hand it's good at keeping the ticks from attaching to my cat so they can all move on to me as I sleep, totally worth it
My understanding is that ticks first need to bite a rodent that is infected to spread Lyme, so maybe gene editing on rodents?
Why bother killing the tick after a tick bite has delivered Lyme's Borrelia burgdorferi spirochete? Even if it's effective at killing ticks, it won't stop Lyme transmission.
And for it to be effective at killing ticks, the human has to be completely steeped in this GABA channel blocker paralytic.
The eye drops offer no real safety guarantees because the dosages are no where near comparable. The human study of surface skin had no data on bites and a short observation period of 6 weeks (roughly the 11-day half-life x 5 half-lives to wash out the dose?).
----
The reported cost for ophthalmic 10ml solution of 0.25% lotilaner/Xdemvy for mites is ~$2k.
Reported adverse effects in dogs of lotilaner from 2013-2018 were only ~250, compared to 4k-18K for other drugs (no data on prevalence/usage).
It works as a GABA channel inhibitor (neurologic paralytic), specific to mites and perhaps ticks. No effect found in mammalian cells at ~11K/daily dosage for the ophthalmic drops.
Human blepharitis study had ~400 people in treatment arm over 6 weeks, ~50% effective.
Half-life of 11 days. No reported reversal agent. So if it is toxic, you're out of luck.
The optical solution is a tiny amount in the eyes, so little systemic exposure risk.
The tick pill involves much more systemic exposure via blood, so the eye drop experience says almost nothing about risk to humans.
I imagine the exposure to the tick from a blood bite is 10-1000x what it is from walking on the skin, so it's not clear to me this would stop lyme's Borrelia burgdorferi from being transmitted with the initial bite.
So: no.
> Even if a tick is attached, it must have taken a blood meal to transmit Lyme disease. At least 36 to 48 hours of feeding is typically required for a tick to have fed and then transmit the bacterium that causes Lyme disease.