FACTS

1. Ticks have four life stages: egg, larva (infant), nymph (immature) and adult (mature).
2. Ticks are arachnids. This means that they are more closely related to spiders and scorpions than insects.
3. It can take up to three years for a tick to mature to the adult stage and reproduce.
4. Ticks may appear as small dark specks on your pet’s fur (larva stage).
5. Ticks feed on the blood of their hosts—humans, birds, reptiles, and wild and domestic mammals.
6. There almost 900 tick species. Ninety of these are found in the continental United States, many of which are capable of transmitting diseases such as Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever and Alpha-gal.
7. Tick infestations are more common in dogs than cats. They are also easier to prevent since there are more FDA-approved products to kill ticks on dogs than on cats.
8. Ticks are not born with disease agents. They acquire them during feeding and pass them along to other animals during subsequent feedings. Many diseases are only transmitted after many hours of feeding.
9. Pets (and humans) may contract multiple diseases from a single tick bite. These diseases can be very serious and even fatal. The tick that your dog carries into the house can bite you and spread disease.
10. Never remove a tick with your bare hand, and never twist to remove it. Instead, use tweezers or special tick-removal instruments, such as TickEase tweezers, to grasp the tick close to the skin and pull it out gently.

STATS

• Lyme disease is caused by bacteria that are transmitted to humans through the bite of infected ticks. Lyme disease is currently the most common vector-borne disease in the United States, with over 23.5 thousand new cases in 2018.
• In 2017, 41 percent of surveyed adults in the U.S. stated they were concerned about a family member or themselves catching Lyme disease.
• In 2017, it was found that only 76 percent of those aged 18 to 34 years knew that Lyme disease was transmitted through the bite of a tick and 22 percent thought the disease could be transmitted through infected blood.
• The CDC has announced that the number of people diagnosed each year with Lyme disease has climbed to nearly half a million, specifically 476,000, which is a jump of 59% over the 300,000 estimate previously listed on the CDC’s website.