Bottom Line/HEALTH:How about spraying your yard? A lot of people around here spray their yards for ticks. Does that work?
Dr. Richard Horowitz:Well, we did it because in our area—in New York, in the Hudson Valley—we were getting a lot of ticks. I was sitting on my deck one day and a tick started coming on to me and I wasn’t even on the lawn. We have been using a product called Ultra-Tempo. Now I’m an environmentalist. I do not like environmental chemicals—let me say this first. But it does not get into the ground water. It has a seven-day half-life, and it will kill the adults and the nymphal ticks. So we do use it—we have eight boxes around our property. They’re expensive and many people can’t do it, but New York Tick Control comes and they’ll do our property twice a year. They’re now looking at other ways of vaccinating mice—that may be a way to stop Lyme disease. In Connecticut, the Connecticut Agricultural Center is looking at a fungus to kill ticks, so everyone’s trying to figure out how to get these ticks out of the environment. With global warming, we’ve got a problem here because the ticks and mosquitoes are going to be expanding.
 

 

 

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