RICHMOND, Va. — An estimated 31 million people in the United States are bitten by a tick every year, according to the CDC, and Lyme disease is the most common tick-borne illness, with an estimated 476,000 patients treated annually.
Not every tick carries disease, but in Virginia, the black-legged tick, American dog tick and Lone Star tick are primary concerns for carrying Lyme disease, Alpha-gal syndrome and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.
Public health entomologist Dr. Eleanor Labgold recommends wearing long pants and light colors, doing frequent checks and considering a repellent like permethrin to reduce the risk of a tick bite.
If a tick is found on your body, the Virginia Department of Health recommends identifying it and watching for symptoms, including fever or rash.
Dr. Labgold offered this guidance on how to safely remove a tick:
"Get a pair of fine tweezers or flat tweezers, whatever you have at home is fine. And really push down on the skin as close as you can to try to get as firm of a grasp on the tick as possible. If you're feeling squishy, you probably have the body of the tick, and you want to try to get lower. So, once you feel kind of a firm, hard part of the tick, then you want to pull up in one firm motion, and you have the best chance of getting the mouth parts out."
The Virginia Department of Health uses two methods to survey ticks, one of which is a citizen tick survey that allows the public to participate.
"If you find a tick on yourself or on your companion animal like a dog or a cat, you can take a picture of it, or you can take the tick itself and you can send it into the Virginia Department of Health," Dr. Labgold said. "We keep a record of that, so we have a dashboard and you can see where all of our submissions are coming from, and we'll also send you an email when we've identified that tick for you so that you know what you're dealing with."
The other method the Virginia Department of Health uses is tick drags, in which a square piece of fabric is dragged across a public area to collect ticks for study.
At one tick drag in the eastern part of the state, Dr. Labgold said about 200 ticks were found in just an hour and a half.
For more information and to access the tick survey, visit the Virginia Department of Health's tick identification page.
This is a developing story. Email the CBS 6 Newsroom if you have additional information to share.
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