For the month of May, we’re digging into our archives for Science in Photos. For our final SiP retrospective we give you - the tick! Granted, not our prettiest SiP but it’s certainly timely. Tick season has officially arrived, May is National Lyme Disease Awareness Month, and annual cases of Lyme disease continue to rise. So this summer stay cool, wear sunscreen, and keep an eye out for these tiny but terrible critters.
Tight as a tick
A tick burrows into dinner, which in this case happens to be the leg of Ashley Prytherch, a medical photographer based at the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford, England. This image brought Prytherch a 2014 Wellcome Image award but, fortunately, nothing more.
Ticks are notorious disease carriers. They feed on the blood of other animals and if one of those animals is infected, the tick may transmit that infection to the next animal it takes a meal from.
Among the transmissible diseases to humans: babesiosis, ehrilichosis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever and, of course, Lyme disease, which some experts say is much more prevalent than some statistics suggest.
Tick bites have also been linked to severe red meat allergies and a newly discovered viral disease.
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