WebProNews

Tag: ticks

  • Biologist Discovers New Species of Tick… Up Nose

    ScienceDaily reported that American biologist Tony Goldberg regularly travels to Kibale National Park in western Uganda to watch how infectious diseases travel throughout the wilds, but something he did not anticipate was finding an undiscovered species of tick up his nose. A Wisconsin native and familiar with his local tick population, he’d never heard of anyone having a tick in their nose, so he did some extensive research.

    “When I got back to the U.S., I realized I had a stowaway,” he said. “When you first realize you have a tick up your nose, it takes a lot of willpower not to claw your face off.”

    The findings were published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, which may be viewed here in its entirety.

    Goldberg is a professor of pathobiological science at University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine and associate director for research in the UW-Madison Global Health Institute, so he has a little experience dealing with intrusive insects.

    After carefully removing the tick, he sealed it in a test tube and froze it. When he and a Texas A&M University colleague sequenced the tick’s DNA, they discovered it had no matches in the database. “Either it’s a species of tick that is known but has never been sequenced, or it’s a new species of tick,” he wrote in the study.

    Chimpanzees, common in the Kibale National Park, deal with nose ticks all the time, and Goldberg’s tick was not the first to latch onto a human. In order to determine just how frequent the nose ticks are at Kibale, Goldberg and Harvard chimp expert Richard Wrangham took a series of high-res photos to study chimp noses. In about one of five chimps’ noses was a tick.

    Believed to be of the genus Amblyomma, Goldberg suggests that the nose tick “could be an underappreciated, indirect, and somewhat weird way in which people and chimps share pathogens.”

    Since the tick avoided detection as Goldberg flew internationally, if the frequency of global travel is factored in, nose ticks could easily spread from Uganda to the rest of the world. The ticks likely evolved to target the nose to escape being combed out through regular chimpanzee grooming.

    [Image via The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene]

  • Ticks And Spiders: Early Spring Triggers Hatching

    Many states have experienced a shockingly mild winter this year, and Spring popped in towing record-setting warm weather with it. Because of the unexpected, sudden warmth, entomologists say ticks will likely be a huge problem this year because their eggs will hatch much sooner than usual.

    The problem is that the little guys that will be coming out of those eggs are so small, they can’t even be seen with the naked eye–unlike their adult counterparts, which are the ones most of us are used to. And because they attach themselves to any warm-blooded creature who comes along, their potential to spread disease is great.

    The CDC has provided a useful list of occupations that may expose people to Lyme disease, which is what ticks are most known for and can cause anything from minor aches and pains to long-term heart problems.

    The early warmth means spiders have also seen a jump in numbers already this year, including the brown recluse, which has a deadly bite. Spiders have been in the news recently because of other weather-related problems–namely flooding, which was to blame for a huge amount of arachnids descending upon an Australian town earlier this month in order to escape rising waters. An adult jumping spider is also in headlines this week after an important find was made.

    The CDC recommends spraying lawns with pesticides to help control tick population, as well as protecting any animals that spend time outdoors with medicated flea and tick prevention. They also say that a Lyme disease vaccine is no longer available, as the company who created it discontinued its manufacture in 2002. If you were vaccinated before then, chances are good that you are not protected by it any longer.