Should I worry about ticks?
As arachnid superorders go, ticks are pretty evolutionarily successful. They’ve been around for at least 100 million years in one variety or another, with their main party trick – hanging around until they can latch a host to feed on – working on thousands of different animals across almost endless environments. But how concerned should you be about them in the UK? You won’t miss the blood they take, but they can cause a variety of unpleasant conditions in their hosts – and there’s some evidence that their population is growing.
Just so we’re all on the same page, there are at least 900 species of ticks currently operating across every continent – some targeting seabirds and lizards, others cattle or dogs. Ticks sense vibrations and body heat, and will find a good place to wait for a host, then latch on to it, finding a patch of skin where the animal’s blood vessels run close to the surface and where it’s hard to be scratched away. At this point, it digs in and inserts its barbed, tubular mouthpart – sometimes secreting attachment “cement” to make itself harder to remove. In between slurps, it squirts saliva into the wound, containing a protein that prevents the host’s blood from clotting.
It’s this saliva that causes a lot of tick-related issues, not only by transmitting pathogens, but by countering the host’s own bodily responses in ways that can be harmful. Shutting down pain receptors and the immune system is helpful for ticks, for example, but for hosts, it can lead to serious problems.
“Lyme disease, probably the condition most strongly associated with ticks, is a bacterial infection, which might affect as many as 5,000 people each year in the UK,” says Dr Tim Brooks, head of the rare and imported pathogens laborator (RIPL). “The most common symptom is a spreading, bullseye rash at the site of the tick bite, which typically develops up to a month after being bitten, but other symptoms include a non-specific flu-like illness, a facial droop, nerve pains and numbness or tingling in the hands or feet.”
More recently, ticks have also been found in the UK carrying tick-borne encephalitis, or TBE, which can cause a range of diseases, from a completely asymptomatic infection or mild flu-like illness, all the way to severe infection in the central nervous system such as meningitis or swelling of the brain.
More information about symptoms can be found on the NHS website. TBE has been prevalent in many parts of the world, including several European countries, but was first detected in ticks in England in 2019. Cases in humans in the UK have been – so far – thankfully rare.
In 2017, former England rugby captain Matt Dawson had to undergo heart surgery after a tick bite. So, is there more cause for concern now? It’s tough to say. “Since data collection began in 2005, there has been a general trend of increasing cases of laboratory-confirmed Lyme disease,” says Brooks. “That rise may be due to a combination of increased awareness as well as improved surveillance, and better access to diagnostics – but it may also be related to increased potential for encounters with ticks due to changes in wildlife populations and habitat modification that may have resulted in changes in tick distribution across the country.”
At the same time, ticks don’t move around much by themselves, and this works in your favour if you’re trying to avoid them. “The most common UK tick species, the deer/sheep ticks, survive in many habitats, but prefer moist areas with dense ground level vegetation, which can be found in woodland, grassland, moorland, heathland and some urban parks and gardens,” says Brooks. “They don’t fly or jump. They wait on vegetation for a host to pass by, and then climb on – so while walking in green spaces, consider wearing clothing that covers your skin to make it more difficult for ticks to access a suitable place to bite, using insect repellent such as DEET and wearing light-coloured clothing so that you can easily spot ticks and brush them off.”
It’s also not disastrous if one does manage to sink its fangs – well, mouthpart – into you. “On average, approximately 4% of ticks are infected with the bacteria that can cause Lyme disease in England and Wales,” says
Brooks. “But the presence of the bacteria in a tick doesn’t automatically mean that the person will be infected, especially if the tick is removed promptly.”
After spending time outside, it’s worth giving yourself and your pets – or children – a once-over for ticks: data from the UK Health Security Agency’s (UKHSA) Tick Surveillance Scheme shows that adults are commonly bitten on the legs, while children are commonly bitten around the head or neck. If you do find an unwanted passenger, removing it with a tick removal tool or fine-tipped tweezers can mitigate the risk of infection. And, if you start to experience symptoms, remember that rashes only occur in roughly two-thirds of cases of Lyme disease: contact your GP for antibiotics to fend it off.
Try not to use ticks as an excuse to stay on the beaten track, however.Research suggests there are enormous benefits to getting out in nature, with forests, in particular helping to mitigate everything from anxiety to depression. Ticks might have made an evolutionary success of sitting around snacking for most of the time, but you don’t have to.
found that successful artists tend to show greater neuroticism than the average population, and certain laboratory experiments suggest that greater neuroticism results in more insightful problem-solving. Perkins also cites a study by Dr Paul Irwing at the University of Manchester, who recently examined the personalities of amateur and professional comedians. While the average personality traits were similar for both groups, Irwing found that the professional comedians had considerably higher levels of neuroticism than the amateurs and the average population.
One explanation could be that the life of professional comedians leads them to become more neurotic over time. It cannot be easy, after all, to rely on people’s laughter for your living, and be faced with the constant scrutiny of critics. Irwing, however, finds this unlikely; there’s little evidence that environmental factors, such as someone’s profession, change personality. He suggests that the arrow of causation runs in the opposite direction: neuroticism may make people funnier.
A greater sensitivity to social slights or embarrassments could contribute to l’esprit de l’escalier, for instance – that experience of finding the perfect witticism only after you have left a conversation. Those thoughts could then inspire new comedic material that may not occur to someone who is less inclined to mull over awkward situations. The comedian may even amplify some of the neurotic musings for comic effect. From Joan Rivers to Simon Amstell, plenty of comedians have mined their anxieties for their acts, after all.
Given that laughter reduces stress, humour could also be a useful strategy for comics to cope more constructively with the worries that plague their minds, suggests Irwing. “Comedians turn something negative into something positive.”
Given the unhappiness it brings, neuroticism may still not be the most desirable trait, but acknowledging its strengths as well as its weaknesses could be heartening for anyone who feels that they are defined by their anxieties and worries. “It’s important for the public to have a nuanced picture,” Perkins says. He even claims that, for some people, “neuroticism may be a form of superpower”.
Strategies for calm
If you find that your anxiety and worries are overwhelming, psychological research can offer some techniques to calm your feelings and quieten the negative chatter in your head.
One of my favourite strategies is self-distancing, which involves looking at your problem from an outside perspective. You might imagine that you are advising a friend who is facing the same issue. You could even talk to yourself in the third person – “David thinks…” – while thinking your way through the topic that is bothering you.
The technique may sound a little strange, but a considerable body of scientific research shows that this prevents brooding and encourages a more reflective and philosophical stance towards the situation at hand, so that you are better able to find a constructive path forwards. And this may have long-term benefits for mental health. A recent study by Ariana Orvell, an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, for instance, found that a short online course on the best ways to practise self-distancing reduced participants’ risks of developing depression over the following six months. This was especially true for those scoring high in neuroticism, who may have been most vulnerable to depression.
If self-distancing isn’t your thing, another useful practice can be acceptance and reappraisal, in which you attempt to look at your worries and anxieties more dispassionately. Without denying your feelings, you might question whether there is a good factual basis for the thoughts that are occupying your mind, whether they convey useful information on which you can act, and whether there might also be a more positive interpretation of the event. This kind of exercise may take a little time to master, but cognitive behavioural therapists find that it helps clients to curb their “catastrophising” thought-spirals.
This new understanding of neuroticism has certainly shifted my own perspective on my worrying habit. The tendency to overthink life’s challenges may be a part of who I am, but I can now choose how deeply I engage with the fears and apprehensions. I still feel that a storm is approaching, but experience tells me that the clouds will often pass without my ship capsizing.
The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Transform Your Life by David Robson is published by Canongate (£10.99).To support the
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Worriers may be more likely to spot potential health problems before they became a danger
vidly evoked the bohemian oasis it must have become during Paris’s cultural boom of the 1950s and 1960s. The courtyard felt like Varda’s private beach, decked with plants and decorated in shades of crimson and purple – very different from the severe site she recalled moving into, with no heating and no bathroom. By the time she and Demy had become star auteurs, the place was better equipped for entertaining, but at that point Varda didn’t photograph their guests: an enduring regret, she
The image was a way of showing how a narrative can be born out of a single still moment
Rosalie Varda
told me, was that she never took pictures of the Doors singer Jim Morrison, who would come to dinner.
Heart potato, 1953.
Rue Daguerre became Varda’s base for an eclectic, globetrotting career, taking in era-defining feminist fictions (One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, Vagabond); numerous documentaries, including studies of the Black Panthers and Los Angeles murals; hybrid works such as Jacquot de Nantes, an imaginative recreation of Demy’s childhood; and photographic studies of China in 1957 and Cuba in 1962.
An image of the artist Alexander Calder and his family taken by Agnès Varda in Paris in 1954.
Varda found renewed attention this century partly through films such as her playful, affecting autobiography The Beaches of Agnès(2008), partly through her impish new delight in selfpromotion. But photography always remained a key thread – right at the end of her life, she enthused about becoming an Instagrammer. And one way or another, still images continued to fuel her films. One example is an enigmatic photo from Expo54 showing a dead goat, a child and a naked man on the beach; it would inspire her 1982 film Ulysse, in which Varda pondered the image’s meaning, and she mused on it again in The Beaches of Agnès. “It was a way of showing how a narrative can be born out of a single still moment,” says Rosalie Varda of Ulysse. “The shutter clicks – but before and after, there’s a whole story to tell.”
La Pointe Courte, From Photographs to Film is at the Cloître SaintTrophime, Arles, until 24 September. La Pointe Courte and Expo54are published by Delpire & Co (€20 each)