[mercutio2]

Your epidemiologist pals wouldn’t laugh at the idea of freezing thousands upon thousands of ticks every warm season?

I tend to think they would.

Tick borne illnesses are unfortunate, but for people who live in rural areas like I (and apparently jjeaff) have lived, where we would keep jars of isopropyl alcohol around in which everyone could put the the few dozen ticks they’d pick off their clothes and bodies during a one hour meeting, holding on to an individual tick just seems ridiculous.

If you get a red rash, or lethargy, by all means, go to the doctor. But in areas with high tick counts but low tick borne illness prevalence, tracking individual ticks just sounds silly.

[Fomite]

Nope! Their suggestion (last time I had a tick bite) was to keep the tick for testing, because there are a number of different pathogens, with different approaches to treatment, you can get from ticks.

Naturally, there's a latent period, so you don't retain them for very long, but that's the advice I got from a woman who works with forestry workers in NC on tickborne illness.

[DmenshunlAnlsis]

Generally speaking, if it’s safe to do so, you want to capture and keep any animal that you’re concerned may have bitten you and transmitted disease or envenomated you. Be it a tick, a spider, or a snake, although it’s generally much easier to pull off with a tick than a snake. Emphasis on, “if it is safe...” of course.

[jjeaff]

So how do your friends suggest that they store the hundreds or thousands of ticks per season that your average farmer or outdoorsman might pull off themselves?

I guess we'll need some sort of rolling catalog system, labels for the dates etc. Perhaps a dedicated lab freezer with specimen vials would do the trick. Of course, if there are ever any symptoms, we'll have to have hundreds of ticks checked. I wonder what that costs? Would your insurance cover the testing of 275 tiny ticks? Or maybe we need a database system to take photos of the bite area, then we can bar code the offending tick and upload the photo to the system.

https://www.terrauniversal.com/gallery/lab_equipment/images/...

[Fomite]

Given the testing involves mashing them up, I don't expect the volume of ticks to be a particular problem. Given the average incubation period for most diseases of concern is less than two weeks, we're talking about at worst a dozen or so ziploc bags, and that's if you're taking ticks off yourself every day.

Two other notes: I'm highly skeptical that "thousands" of ticks is your average outdoorsman, especially given the seasonality of ticks, and the reported volume of tick bites in forestry workers, which wasn't that high and my colleagues did consider appalling.

Second: "The South" which you keep mentioning is not made up of just farmers and outdoorsmen. It's also made up of major urban areas with large forest fragmentation issues.