>>1001949>>1001962New Englander here. Yeah, ticks are a lot worse than when I was a kid, but it's something that we'll either learn to live with, or we won't.
I remember finding 1 or 2 dog ticks per summer just about 20 years ago, and now I find between 10 and 50 per week, not including the ones on my dog. Early this year, after an afternoon of trail hiking and some bushwhacking, I got 25 off of me and 40 off of my dog in a single day. My mother has chronic Lyme now, and my cousin and a few of my friends have had Lyme more than once each.
But I've never had Lyme, and neither has my dog. If you're careful and you check yourself at the end of each day, you can avoid it. It's just that the tick population in the area has increased so quickly that people haven't learned how to deal with them quickly enough. And treatment medicine is improving too.
I'm scared of the funky bacterial infections that the Lone Star tick is associated with, but I haven't seen any of them around here yet. Regardless, I'm not going anywhere.
