Tick-borne diseases pose a serious threat throughout much of the habitable world, with tens of thousands of new human cases of tick-borne disease reported annually in the US. There is considerable public interest in arthropod repellents based on natural products, which is reflected in the number of contemporary studies evaluating the efficacy of plant extracts and constituent compounds. Although natural products have a long history of use as repellents, in recent years laboratory evaluations have found additional compounds and essential oils that have potential for commercialization. In behavioral bioassays with ticks, direct comparisons of natural products with the widely used synthetic repellent deet show that the efficacies of several are similar to that of deet. Repellent phytochemicals cannot automatically be assumed to be safe for application to human skin and require toxicological testing.

Natural product options for repelling ticks of medical importance

244th National Meeting (2012)

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