What Tick Saliva Does to the Human Body
Ticks use their saliva to create a “lake of blood” inside their hosts.
José Ribeiro was 33 when he got his first tick bite, in the 1980s, and he remembers it as a momentous occasion. He had recently started studying tick saliva, a complex molecular cocktail that ticks inject into their hosts to inhibit pain, prevent blood clotting, and suppress the immune system—all so the tick can feed undetected for days and days and days. Ribeiro had been studying this in a lab, but now he was finally witnessing it in the flesh. In his flesh.
He marveled at the bite. It did not hurt. It did. Ticks use saliva to manipulate the body of their hosts so their bites stay painless, itchless, and as unobtrusive as a bug swelling with blood can be. Scientists have since cataloged from the saliva of various tick species.
