And I'm an Epidemiologist who went to school in the South.
I tend to think they would.
Tick borne illnesses are unfortunate, but for people who live in rural areas like I (and apparently jjeaff) have lived, where we would keep jars of isopropyl alcohol around in which everyone could put the the few dozen ticks they’d pick off their clothes and bodies during a one hour meeting, holding on to an individual tick just seems ridiculous.
If you get a red rash, or lethargy, by all means, go to the doctor. But in areas with high tick counts but low tick borne illness prevalence, tracking individual ticks just sounds silly.
Naturally, there's a latent period, so you don't retain them for very long, but that's the advice I got from a woman who works with forestry workers in NC on tickborne illness.
I guess we'll need some sort of rolling catalog system, labels for the dates etc. Perhaps a dedicated lab freezer with specimen vials would do the trick. Of course, if there are ever any symptoms, we'll have to have hundreds of ticks checked. I wonder what that costs? Would your insurance cover the testing of 275 tiny ticks? Or maybe we need a database system to take photos of the bite area, then we can bar code the offending tick and upload the photo to the system.
https://www.terrauniversal.com/gallery/lab_equipment/images/...
