Ticked? DEET may be answer: BU study

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This article was published 26/07/2019 (2471 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

DEET may be the answer to dealing with problem ticks in the province.

A Brandon University professor and a group of students released a paper earlier this year looking in-depth at ticks and their response to DEET. The study examines whether DEET, an active ingredient in many insect repellant products, works as an effective repellant for ticks, and also looks at understanding at the gene level why this is the case.

“(Our research found) if we wrap everything together and keep it simple, basically DEET is quite effective for ticks,” said Bryan Cassone, a professor in the department of biology at Brandon University.

He investigated the subject alongside students Cody Koloski, Carlyn Duncan and Patrick Gohl, motivated by how much of an issue they are in Manitoba.

“There’s so many wood ticks here, and we simply have no information on ticks and DEET. They tell you to apply it, they tell you it’s effective repellent, but there’s very little done on it.”

Their research found that the effectiveness of DEET is dependant on the concentration of it.

“We’ve done a lot of assays right now where we look at five per cent DEET, 30 per cent DEET and 75 per cent DEET, and what we found is the higher the concentration of DEET, the more effective it is as a repellant.”

DEET doesn’t just work as a repellant, he said, where it keeps the mosquito or tick from landing on the person, but through their research they’re finding it also works as an insecticide.

“A tick that’s in contact with five per cent or particularly 75 or 30 per cent DEET will in most cases die within a few hours,” he said.

However, it might not always be effective. If it’s going into a contact area where it has been recently applied it might die, but if it’s one where DEET has been on for awhile, it’s less likely, he said.

They’ve done some behavioural trials and a lot of DNA work so far, primarly looking at the wood tick.

They’re still in the process of looking more into depth at ticks’ response to DEET, including different behavioural tests to truly gauge how effective DEET is as a repellant and insecticide. They’re hoping to submit another study later this summer, and they have four more in progress that will be released in the months following.

One of the studies that they’ve completed but has yet to be released looks at 10 different populations of ticks throughout southwestern Manitoba and how they respond to different concentrations of DEET. They were looking to see if there was any difference between populations, and found that it did differ slightly, but there was still the general trend where the higher the concentration, the more effective DEET was as a repellent. The full results from that study will likely be published later this summer, he said.

“I think you’re going to see in the next two years a good amount of tick DEET related research in Manitoba.”

» mverge@brandonsun.com

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