Transcript:

Lyme Prevention Lyme disease is spread by ticks, and the best way to protect yourself from getting the disease, is to avoid being bitten. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet. Zajac: All the evidence we have about treatment, of every category of infectious agent, says prevention is better than cure. Ann Zajac is a professor in the veterinary College at Virginia Tech. Zajac: When we rely on drugs to cure things, inevitably the organisms figure out how to evade them. And so for Lyme disease, other tickborne diseases, it's really important for people to prevent infection in the first place, both on themselves and on their pets. When you're preparing to go out into an environment where you where you have a chance of encountering ticks, if you wear light-colored clothing, it's easier to see the ticks crawling around on you. People often ask about using DEET and other repellents. DEET does repel ticks for several hours. The general recommendation would be that using the insecticide-treated clothing would be better than DEET, because DEET discourages them but doesn't kill them. If you use the actual pesticide on the clothing which is safe for humans, it will actually kill the ticks. Another one is putting your close in the dryer after you've been out hiking. They dry out in the dryer and die. All those tricks that we have are are much better than trying to rely on antibacterial treatment of the infection after it's occurred Zajac: There is an excellent website that is full of information about ticks. It's called TickEncounter. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet