New 'Natural' Tick Remedy for Dogs
This comes from a published paper looking at the effectiveness of essential oils for ticks, and they studied turmeric oil.
As you may know, I LOVE turmeric, and in particular the active ingredient in turmeric, 95% curcumin. It is a proven holistic anti inflammatory, beneficial in arthritis, allergies, even some of the more serious autoimmune diseases.
Now external parasites, and in particular TICKS, are proving to be VERY difficult to repel.. except for some of the news generation of chemical insecticides, which can pose a host of other health concerns..
Then many of the essential oils can be toxic to our pets, especially if not applied undiluted..
SO now we have something NEW, SAFE and EFFECTIVE :-)
Here is the paper
Preventing tick attachment to dogs using essential oils
Penelope Goode 1, Lauren Ellse 2, Richard Wall 2
Abstract
Preventing tick bites using repellents could make a valuable contribution to an integrated tick management programme for dogs.
Here, the ability of a range of essential oils or active ingredients of commercially available repellents, to abolish the orientation and taxis of the tick Ixodes ricinus towards sebum extracted from dog hair was examined in laboratory bioassays.
Substantial differences between oils were observed, but turmeric oil was both able to prevent a climbing response by ticks and had a longer residual activity than other oils.
A blanket-drag field assay was then used to compare the attachment of ticks to blankets impregnated with one of: turmeric oil, DEET (positive control), orange-oil or excipient only (negative controls). In total, 899 ticks were counted, with an average of 23.3 (SD ± 21.3) ticks per blanket drag for excipient-only (n = 16), 26.9 (SD ± 28.6) for orange oil (n = 16), 2.6 (SD ± 2.0) for turmeric oil (n = 16) and 3.4 (SD ± 3.7) for DEET (n = 16). Finally, in a participatory in vivo trial, tick acquisition by 15 untreated control dogs was compared with 24 dogs sprayed with turmeric-oil and 16 dogs sprayed with orange oil (both 2.5% v/v diluted in water with a 1% coco glucoside excipient) before each walk in known tick infested areas.
The percentage of dogs with ticks attached to the legs or belly of dogs sprayed with turmeric oil suspension (15% ± 19.4%) was significantly lower than that of ticks attached to the same areas of dogs sprayed with orange oil suspension (85% ± 19.4%) and unsprayed dogs (73% ± 26.2%) (P < 0.05).
The data indicate that turmeric-oil may form a valuable component of a tick management programme for domestic dogs.
