The show house, with the tick

I had a question, I saw a show of House once, and it had a girl who had a tick in her vagina. I was wondering, because we just had some problems with ticks, and it made me wonder if this is possible in real life?

The march of the ticks

Tick-borne diseases are on the increase across the northern hemisphere, but the pattern of emergence is anything but uniform. So attributing the rise to the currently fashionable 'cause' of climate change is, Professor Randolph argues, far too simplistic. "There is no question at all that vector-borne diseases, tick-borne diseases in particular, are hugely affected by climate. But it is absolutely questionable that all the 'bad' scenarios we see are due to climate change. It needs to be tested. There may be quite different explanations."

For some years now, Professor Randolph and her group have been investigating the biological processes that drive tick populations and thus the dynamics of the diseases they carry. They are, she says, "inches away from having a model that works", that can help them predict how tick populations will respond to key environmental variables.

Professor Randolph uses highly innovative techniques, developed by her husband Professor David Rogers, which exploit meteorological satellite imagery to provide vital temperature and moisture data over space and time. These can be matched against disease incidence reports to look for explanations for the patterns of emergence and change. "Along the southern edge of the tick's distribution, for example, increasingly dry summers will play a important role in determining limits to the disease. This is because moisture conditions are critical to tick survival."