Men's Health: How Not to Get Bitten by Ticks This Summer

The best tick repellent you can use.

The last thing you want to bring home from a long hike or a quick dog walk is a case of Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain Spotted fever, or even a single one of the ticks that carry these (and more) diseases.

So you need a good tick repellent. Especially since the number of tick-borne diseases continues to climb in the U.S., according to the CDC. Ticks are pretty much everywhere in the U.S. right now, and the CDC says that especially in the northeast, we can expect every year to be a "bad" year for ticks.

But to protect yourself properly, you’ve got to get the right tick repellent. “Many people have the perception that anything that sucks blood can be repelled similarly,” says Thomas N. Mather, Ph.D., founder and director of the Tick Encounter Resource Center at the University of Rhode Island. But mosquitos, ticks, and fleas have different ways of finding you—“mosquitos fly to you, and ticks don’t fly, and they don’t have eyes,” he says. “So there’s no reason to think that the same product that would work for a mosquito would work against a tick.”

Which repellent to use? "We always recommend that someone wears the repellent they're most comfortable with," explains Jody Gangloff-Kaufmann, coordinator of community Integrated Pest Management at the New York State Integrated Pest Management Program. "If you have one less tick on you, there's one less chance of your getting a disease," she says.

See the full article from Marty Munson on Men's Health's website here.