Tick Experts Reveal The 6 Things They'd Never, Ever Do Outdoors

Climate change is making tick-borne illnesses more common, which makes tick prevention strategies even more critical.

No one wants to worry about summer illnesses, but there are certain diseases that spread in the warm weather because of tick bites.

“Ticks themselves are not particularly dangerous to humans, it’s just, unfortunately, the diseases that they can carry can be transmitted to humans [and] end up causing them harm,” said Dr. Christopher Bazzoli, an emergency medicine physician at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.

Lyme disease is the tick-borne illness that gets the most attention. “Right around 90,000 cases of Lyme [disease] are reported to the CDC every year here in the United States, but probably more like [300,000] to 400,000 people contract the Lyme infection annually here in the United States,” Bazzoli noted. That means most infections are not reported to the CDC.

Other, less common diseases that ticks also transmit, Bazzoli said, include Rocky Mountain spotted fever, babesiosis and ehrlichiosis.

Ticks don’t bite you and fly off like a mosquito. Instead, it takes hours and hours for them to cement themselves onto your skin and feed, said Dr. Eugene Shapiro, a professor of pediatrics at Yale School of Medicine in Connecticut. An infected tick (and not all ticks are infected) has to be on for 24 to 36 hours to transmit an infection, Shapiro noted.