Professor provides tips on checking for ticks amid surge in bites

BALTIMORE —

Inside Douglas Norris' lab at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health sits a healthy stack of envelopes — not with letters inside, but with ticks.

"They are creepy for most people, but they transmit a lot of pathogens that affect both humans and companion animals and livestock, so they are pretty important epidemiologically in terms of disease transmission," said Norris, a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Norris started accepting ticks in the mail last year. You can send him any tick you find by filling out a tick identification form . He has received just over 150 mailed ticks so far this year, part of a partnership between the Johns Hopkins Lyme and Tickborne Diseases Research and Education Institute and the Maryland Department of Health