I won’t go into gory detail about the tick I found latched behind my ear approximately 35 hours after a hike in early June. Suffice it to say, the parasite was well fed, and I was horrified.

I am far from alone in making such a disgusting discovery. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), emergency room visits for tick bites have been unusually high in the US this year. Thirty-one million Americans are bitten by ticks annually – and the number has been trending up for over a decade. In the UK, ticks appear to be rising in number and species variety.

“Tick populations are expanding geographically because we’re changing the climate,” explains Vett Lloyd, a professor of biology at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick who studies ticks and the pathogens they transmit.

Milder winters and warmer summers raise ticks’ survival rates. Additionally, human expansion – especially “mowing down forests and living in suburbs on previously forested land” – has expanded tick habitat dramatically, explains Lloyd.

Experts say that suburbs mean more prime habitat for mice, who thrive eating our garbage and harbor dangerous pathogens in their blood, like Lyme disease. More mice support more ticks, who feast on rodents as well as booming deer populations, lizards, birds and other creatures. Ticks can transmit diseases they pick up to human hosts. US rates of Lyme disease were 69% higher in 2022 compared with the 2017-2019 annual average. In England, cases of Lyme rose over 20% between 2024 and 2025.

“The pathogens are expanding almost exclusively because of human changes in how we live in the environment,” says Lloyd.

Here’s what you need to know to protect yourself from ticks.

How do you check for ticks?

“Ticks have a relatively boring life,” says Lloyd. They hang out in moist, dark and shaded areas like leaf litter. When hungry, they crawl up blades of grass, where they wait to brush on to anything tasty that walks past, she says.

If a tick reaches your body, it typically climbs upward, seeking a dark, damp area, like the backs of knees, navel, groin, armpits or behind the ears, says Lloyd. There, they bite, injecting an anesthetic that prevents you from feeling pain or itchiness as they dig in.

The best time to find a tick is before it bites. “It can’t give you a disease if it hasn’t started drinking your blood,” says Lloyd. Showering immediately after spending time outdoors may wash a tick off before it has a chance to latch.

Perform a tick check after being outdoors. This can be done alone with a mirror, and by lightly running your hands all over your body. Unfed ticks will feel like bumps the size of a poppy seed or a sesame seed. A fed tick can swell to the size of a blueberry. If you’re comfortable with it, another person can help with the search.

The longer a tick feeds, the more likely it is to spread disease. Removing a tick before it’s been on you for 24 hours greatly reduces the risk of disease transmission, per the CDC.

What should you do if you’ve been bitten by a tick?

“You want to try to get the whole tick out,” says Dr Charlotte Mao, a pediatric infectious disease physician who works with the Bay Area Lyme Foundation. Mao recommends using “fine tip tweezers with firm gentle pressure” to grasp the tick at its head and pull it up. “You want to try to not have the mouth parts break off and stay stuck in the skin.”

Wash the bite site and your hands thoroughly with soap and water or rubbing alcohol, she says.

Trying to remove it is better than leaving it in, even if you don’t get the tick out perfectly. “While the tick is on you, it can be transmitting pathogens,” notes Lloyd. “The mouth parts are organic; they will eventually dissolve, and the part of the tick that contains the pathogens is all in [its] body,” she says. If you accidentally “pop” the tick, wash your hands well and disinfect the bite site, as these fluids can spread disease.

Both Mao and Lloyd suggest saving the tick in a Ziploc bag in your freezer, noting the date and geographic location it was found, if possible.

“It’s not your ideal souvenir,” says Lloyd, but if you begin to exhibit flu-like symptoms, facial drooping, severe headaches or any other worrisome new health issues in the month after your bite, you can get it tested. The Bay Area Lyme Foundation’s website offers a list of laboratories that perform tick testing, some by mail. In the UK, you can mail your tick to the government’s Tick Surveillance Scheme to help researchers map tick habitat, or to international tick test labs.

Consult your primary care provider after a bite, Mao says. They may give you an antibiotic prophylaxis – typically a single dose of doxycycline – to protect against Lyme, as well as other diseases commonly caused by ticks, like anaplasmosis, ehrlichiosis and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. However, there are some tick-borne illnesses that cannot be treated with antibiotics, says Lloyd. These include alpha-gal, an allergy to red meat and other animal products, and babesiosis, a parasitic infection that causes flu-like symptoms and jaundice. If you notice any strange symptoms in the weeks after your tick bite, talk to a doctor right away.

If you identify an expanding solid red or bullseye-shaped rash near the site of your bite, this may be a sign of early Lyme disease. Your doctor may give you a longer course of antibiotics: one to two weeks, depending on the advice of your regional health authority.

Is there any way to prevent getting bitten by a tick?

To reduce your risk of tick bites, the CDC recommends wearing Environmental Protection Agency-approved insect repellants such as Deet or picaridin, long-sleeved shirts, long pants and closed shoes, and tumble-drying clothing on high after returning home to kill any lingering ticks. Stick to the open middle of trails while hiking rather than getting too close to brush or leaf litter.

Ticks aren’t only a threat to hikers and hunters; depending on where you live, you can be bitten by a tick in your own back yard, notes Erika Machtinger, a medical and veterinary entomologist.

Machtinger recommends a few strategies for making your outdoor space safer.

Cutting back vegetation to prevent big shady areas and mowing your lawn frequently to reduce grassy habitat are the simplest interventions, she says. Stone walls are attractive to rodents, and have been shown to harbor high concentrations of ticks, says Machtinger. Seal up any nooks or replace them altogether.

“The single best way to manage ticks is with an acaricide,” a tick-killing pesticide, Machtinger says.

Some homeowners are wary of the effect of acaricide on pollinators and other beneficial insects. A gentler, more targeted option is tick tubes: cardboard rolls stuffed with permethrin-treated cotton that mice discover and transport back to pad their nests, which basically treats them against ticks, Machtinger says.

Pet owners are at higher risk for tick bites, Machtinger says, because “they spend a lot of time with their pets outdoors”. Pets can also transport ticks on their bodies. While Machtinger says cats are pretty good at grooming ticks off their bodies, she recommends checking dogs for ticks and combing their fur out before they come indoors.