Anyone who is called a parasite rarely gets sympathy. Accordingly, the interpretation given in the Duden dictionary is not very flattering: “animal or plant parasites; creatures that benefit one-sidedly from living with other creatures, which it often also damages and in which it can cause diseases.”
Ticks, which belong to the arachnids, also fall under this definition. In the cycle of nature, they also occupy a place in the food chain, although their natural enemies are few and far between, such as nematodes, some species of fungi and the tiny musk wasp. And again and again the eight-legged friends disappear in a bird’s beak.
Whether the parasitic benefit of regulating the population of other living beings, acting as an immune booster and accelerator of evolution, also applies to ticks has not yet been sufficiently researched scientifically.
17 native species
Of the more than 850 species of ticks, 17 species are now native to Austria. The common wood beetle (Ixodes ricinus) is the most common in our country. Preferred hosts of the hedgehog tick are hedgehogs, foxes, weasels, polecats, stoats, dogs and cats. It rarely affects humans. The sheep or riparian forest tick can be recognized by the marbled back plate. She prefers warmer areas and regions where sheep are regularly on the move. She, too, dislikes people.
What keeps the bloodsuckers in the red on the popularity scale is their role as carriers of pathogens with which almost every second tick in Austria is infected. She tears open the host’s skin with her mouthparts and digs a pit in the tissue with her proboscis, which fills with blood that is sucked out. Pathogens can be transmitted with their saliva, which anesthetizes the puncture site and prevents the blood from clotting, such as the bacteria that live in the tick’s intestine and cause Lyme disease. With timely antibiotic therapy, this usually heals without any consequential damage. If you overlook this, the Borrelia can cause damage in other areas of our body (joints, heart, nervous system) that is difficult to diagnose. To date, there is no preventive vaccine.
First vaccination in self-experiment
The situation is different with tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) transmitted by ticks. There is an effective vaccination against the viral disease, which can lead to inflammation of the brain, the meninges and the central nervous system, thanks to the Upper Austrian virologist Christian Kunz (1927-2020). The research lasted two years, then Kunz ventured the first self-experiment. When he still felt no negative effects weeks later, he began driving through the country with his wife Dagmar in 1974 and vaccinated groups of people at risk (farmers, forest workers). 30,000 people were immunized by early 1976. Since then, the preparation has been used worldwide. In 1981 the first Austria-wide TBE vaccination campaign was carried out.
Here man is wrong
There are still a few misconceptions to be cleared up: ticks do not fall from trees onto their victims. The common woodbuck prefers forest soil, grass and bushes, can be stripped in passing and then goes in search of particularly soft skin, for example in the hollows of the knees.
Smothering a tick with oil or glue after the bite is not good first aid. On the one hand, ticks only breathe up to twice an hour, on the other hand, they are stimulated to secrete more saliva. Removing the parasites with a twist is a common myth – ticks don’t have threads. The best way to tackle the teats is to use tweezers very closely, slowly and in a controlled manner.
Source: Nachrichten
