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The Best Tick-Repellent Products for Humans and Dogs

Photo-Illustration: The Strategist; Photos: Retailers

As winter finally thaws and we all kickoff to spend more time outside, it's important to exist wary of tick-borne diseases. The summertime months are when y'all're virtually susceptible because "as the weather gets better, tick numbers rise," co-ordinate to Dr. Thomas Daniels, who studies ticks at Fordham University's Louis Calder Center. Places to spotter out for include wooded areas and patches with tall grass and bushes, explains Dr. Goudarz Molaei, research scientist and director of the CAES Passive Tick Surveillance Plan. It's important to know that tick bites don't just happen on the hiking trail. "Shut to 75 percentage of Lyme-disease cases have been reported from bites that occur in people's own backyards," Molaei explains.

The experts we talked to say the best style to bargain with a tick bite is to preclude information technology from happening at all. Fortunately, at that place are some solid, science-backed ways to prevent the pests from latching on — as well every bit a couple of tools that'll assist you safely remove whatsoever that practise intermission through your defenses.

All-time overall | Best picaridin | Best natural | All-time socks | Best wear handling | Best repellent for dogs | All-time medication for dogs | Best tweezers | Best portable tick remover

Active ingredients: According to Molaei, there are generally 2 types of chemicals that serve as the first line of defense against ticks: repellents, which tin can exist applied directly to the skin, and pesticides, which can be applied to wear. Our experts say the best topical repellents use either DEET or picaridin equally their principal ingredient; when it comes to pesticides, they all recommended wearable treated with permethrin (the aforementioned chemical used in delousing shampoos like Nix), which acts as a "tick-killing agent," according to Dr. Rick Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. We as well considered natural tick repellants such as lemon eucalyptus oil.

When you lot and your dog go for a walk, your pet is more than likely to come up back into the house with a tick than you are. And then if dog owners really want to protect themselves from tick bites, it'south of import they make sure their pet is protected too. According to our experts, the all-time tick preventatives for dogs include oral medications containing fluralaner and topical treatments containing the chemicals imidacloprid, permethrin, and pyriproxyfen.

Safety: Using chemicals on your skin and clothing tin be a little scary. For that reason, nosotros only recommended skin-applied tick-repellent products that are registered in the Environmental Protection Bureau database. Equally for pesticide-treated clothing, all pesticides sold in the United states of america must pass the EPA's safety and efficacy standards, including permethrin.

Nosotros also checked that all of our recommended tick products for dogs were registered every bit safe by the EPA for both pets and owners. One popular tick product for dogs, the Seresto flea and tick collar treated with imidacloprid and flumethrin, is known to be highly effective confronting ticks — even so, following a series of media reports and class-action lawsuits that merits it can cause adverse reactions and fifty-fifty expiry in some dogs, the production's registration condition is under review. For this reason, information technology doesn't announced on our list.

Efficacy: For tick repellants, we looked at how long products retain their tick-defying powers before reapplication is necessary and whether their efficacy is affected by the apply of boosted topical trunk products like sunscreen. For pesticide-treated article of clothing, we noted how many washes an item will through last earlier its efficacy wears off. And as for furry friends, we took note of which products were best for long- and brusque-term use.

Whatever products you lot're using, Jeffrey Hammond of the New York Country Section of Health's public-affairs office recommends doing "a final full-body tick check at the cease of the day and too checking children and pets" in order to protect against ticks and tick-borne illness. A proper tick cheque starts with examining your feet so onto armpits, wrists, knees, and, yes, groin. "Ticks get-go low and crawl up," adds Dr. Thomas Due north. Mather, director of the University of Rhode Island's Center for Vector-Borne Illness and its TickEncounter Resources Center. "If they get to the meridian of your head, it's non that they barbarous out of a tree. Instead, they've crawled all the way up your trunk."

Off! Deep Woods Mosquito and Insect Repellent Towelettes

25% DEET | EPA registered | eight hours

The CDC — along with half dozen of our experts — recommends DEET every bit an constructive tick repellent. "The EPA suggests that any product with DEET should have a concentration between xx and 30 percent of the active ingredient," says Molaei. He does note that while DEET typically lasts for 12 hours against mosquitos, it will but remain effective against ticks for around eight hours maximum. "DEET can also not be combined with lotion or sunscreen, otherwise the efficacy of the product decreases significantly." These towelettes from Off! are soaked in 25 percent DEET and come recommended by Strategist contributor Maureen O'Connor. She uses them to prevent "Quasimodo-like reactions" to musquito bites, but they will too work against ticks. While you can opt for a spray, she says the towelettes are "quick, easy, and can be deployed in a bathroom stall without anyone noticing."

Sawyer Products Premium Insect Repellent With 20% Picaridin

20% picaridin | EPA registered | eight hours

Dr. Catherine Hill, a professor of entomology at Purdue University, says picaridin, an insect repellent that can be applied to the skin, is another effective fashion to ward off ticks. Ostfeld says it's one of "the most effective repellents against black-legged ticks," the carriers of Lyme disease, babesiosis, anaplasmosis, and Powassan virus in about of North America. Compared with products that contain DEET, which tin feel overly oily on the skin, picaridin is "more pleasant aesthetically," says Dr. Kirby Stafford, a medical-veterinarian entomologist. Simply Molaei has one word of caution when using picaridin: "While DEET is considered a relatively safe product, picaridin has less toxicity in comparing, but it can occasionally cause an allergic reaction if it accidentally gets on your confront or into your eyes."

Repel Lemon Eucalyptus Natural Insect Spray

30% lemon eucalyptus oil | EPA registered, DEET and picaridin free | six hours

Though the CDC and EPA do say essential oils like garlic oil and lemon-eucalyptus oil are somewhat effective repellents of black-legged ticks, Mather wouldn't necessarily advise essential oils every bit your primary line of defense. "I'thousand hard-pressed to observe any hard data on them," he says. But if you lot're looking to avert DEET and picaridin or to simply add together a layer of secondary protection, this Repel spray is the way to go. Information technology's recommended past Consumer Reports, which independently lab-tested many popular insect repellent products and gives it a five/five score for its protection against both mosquitoes and deer ticks — impressive for a DEET-complimentary production. You should reapply more regularly than you would a traditional repellent, though: This i lasts only upward to six hours.

Insect Shield Sport Crew Sock

0.52% permethrin | EPA registered | 70 washes

Our experts highly recommended wearing vesture treated with odorless permethrin when yous're out in nature. They especially like permethrin-treated socks for the elementary reason that your feet are your first line of defense against ticks, which offset depression and crawl high. As Dr. Scott Williams, who works at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station'south Department of Forestry and Horticulture, explains, "The weave of the sock makes information technology difficult for the smaller ticks to navigate, which increases their time exposed to the permethrin, which kills more than of them." Wear that's been treated with permethrin can get through the launder nigh lxx times and nonetheless be effective, so this pair volition last you a while. In improver to those pesky ticks, they'll repel mosquitoes, ants, flies, chiggers, and midges. We besides similar that they accept a cushioned sole that'll keep you comfy while hiking or running.

Sawyer Products Premium Permethrin Clothing Insect Repellent, 24 oz.

0.5% permethrin | EPA registered | 6 washes

You can treat your own clothing (and camping gear like tents and backpacks) with permethrin using a spray. "For tick repellent for myself and my field crew, we soak our clothes in permethrin and let them to dry earlier wearing them," says Williams. But unlike pretreated wearable (which tin be washed over and over and retain its tick-repelling ability), clothes yous've sprayed with permethrin lose their ability to kill ticks after about half-dozen weeks or 6 washes (whichever comes first). Spraying your sneakers or hiking boots before going into the wood is some other solid tick-prevention technique, as is spraying gardening gloves, pants, shorts, and T-shirts.

Merely avoid applying it directly to your pare. That's non because permethrin is unsafe; in fact, the concentration of permethrin on pretreated clothing is "well below what the EPA calls the daily dermal, no-observable-effect level," says Mather, meaning information technology'due south functionally nontoxic. Information technology's just that permethrin breaks downward on your pare after xv minutes, co-ordinate to its manufacturer, so spraying it on your body rather than your dress leaves you vulnerable.

K9 Advantix II Flea, Tick and Mosquito Prevention for Dogs, 6 Doses

44.00% permethrin, 8.lxxx% imidacloprid, 0.44% pyriproxyfen | EPA registered | One calendar month

If yous'd rather not give your dog an oral treatment, or if you don't recall it needs protection for three months at a time, Daniels recommends the topical K9 Advantix 2, a product containing permethrin. Each dose lasts for 1 calendar month as long as y'all expect 24 hours to bathe your domestic dog after application. Only know that Advantix, along with well-nigh topical tick repellents for dogs, is super-toxic to cats. If you own both, Stafford recommends keeping your cats abroad from any permethrin-treated dogs for 72 hours after applying the product.

Bravecto Chews for Dogs

1000 mg fluralaner | FDA-canonical | 3 months

When Strategist writer Liza Corsillo interviewed a panel of veterinarians near the best tick treatments for dogs, every ane recommended Bravecto chews, an oral treatment that protects dogs for three months at a fourth dimension. Bravecto works by releasing insect poison into your dog'due south bloodstream; as she explains, it's completely harmless and eventually becomes absorbed into the tissue fluids under a domestic dog'south skin, "where it's transferred to whatsoever biting ticks, which then get expressionless ticks." Because it is prescription medication, you should always consult with your vet starting time: Corsillo notes that some oral tick preventatives including Bravecto are non recommended for dogs with a history of uncontrolled seizures.

Tweezerman Ingrown Hair Splintertweeze

Stainless steel

If you forgot to bring your permethrin-treated socks on your hike and you ended upward with a tick on you, don't panic. All you really need to remove 1 are pointy tweezers — but not apartment-edged tweezers. That's because you demand to be precise. "Recollect of the tick as a bag of germs that happens to be connected to your pare with a straw," explains Mather. If yous squeeze the bug'south body with an imprecise tweezer, all those germs will be released through the "harbinger" and into your peel, which is gross. A pointed tweezer like these satisfyingly precipitous ones from Tweezerman will permit you to get as shut every bit possible to the head of the tick, right adjacent to the skin, and pull up at the connection bespeak without squeezing the bug.

The Original Tick Key for Tick Removal

Anodized aluminum

While pointy-tipped tweezers are the all-time style to remove ticks of all sizes, Dr. Nadine Cohen of CareMount Medical notes that sometimes you might non have access to a pair. That's why she suggests keeping a tick key on your cardinal chain, so you'll ever have a tool designed for the job at the set up. As she explains, it "works by sliding underneath the body of the tick, close to the skin, with the goal of removing the unabridged tick easily and safely." And yeah, it works on dogs too.

• Dr. Nadine Cohen, medical dr., CareMount Medical
Dr. Thomas Daniels, Fordham University'south Louis Calder Middle
Jeffrey Hammond, deputy managing director for communications, New York State Section of Health
• Dr. Catherine Loma, professor of entomology, Purdue University
• Dr. Thomas North. Mather, managing director, University of Rhode Isle's Center for Vector-Borne Disease
Dr. Goudarz Molaei, research scientist and director of the CAES Passive Tick Surveillance Programme and associate clinical professor at Yale Academy's School of Public Health
• Dr. Rick Ostfeld, affliction ecologist at the Cary Establish of Ecosystem Stuydies
• Dr. Kirby Stafford, medical-veterinary entomologist, Connecticut Agronomical Experiment Station
• Dr. Scott Williams, wildlife biologist, Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station

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The All-time Tick-Repellent Products for Humans and Dogs