Tips for ticks?

[TidyMouse]

Hi, I'm curious whether anyone has any advice or tips on how to deal with ticks. We live rurally and have three cats; one in particular is bringing lots of ticks back into the house with him at the moment. They have a regular tick and flea treatment (from the vet, not an aromatherapy-type one) and vet has recommended collars as a next step if there's no improvement. The ticks don't seem to be dying despite the treatment, and we found one on our toddler today, luckily before it bit him. Am I missing something obvious here? Keeping the cats indoors isn't an option but if any of you have tips I'd be grateful.

I don’t have any tips for keeping them out of the house, but I will say check yourself and your child every day and remove them (with a proper tick remover) as soon as possible. My son got bitten by a tick on a school residential. We have no idea how long it was on him but we spotted it when he got home. He got Lymes disease and it was horrific and I wouldn’t want anyone else to go through that.

I'm so sorry, that sounds awful - I hope he is doing okay. This is exactly what I'm worried about. We have the tick removers and luckily so far we've only needed to use them on the cats themselves and on DH but I really don't want DS to get bitten. We are checking him thoroughly but it is worrying. I hope your son is doing better 💕

Yes he’s fine now. This happened in year 5 and he’s at uni now. He was very poorly for about 2-3 months and put on really strong antibiotics for about 12 weeks. We were lucky we saws the tick as he didn’t have a “typical” reaction of the bullseye rash so really had to push doctors to test him. I think some people brush them off and think they’re no worse than a wasp sting or similar, so I always try to raise awareness of how dangerous they can be.
i hope you solve your problem of the cats bringing them in I’m not sure what else to suggest other than what you’re already doing by treating the cats and removing them when you see them.

I'm so glad he's fine now and I agree that it's so important to be careful with them! We have just put collars on the cats today and are checking them every time they come inside plus vacuuming daily (which we do anyway, but with extra attention to places they sit and so on) so I'm hoping that will do the trick.