I used to live in the middle of nowhere, and my neighbors and I were constantly picking ticks off of our pets. When you think about ticks, you associate them with living in the woods. But these Lyme-disease carriers are everywhere. Whether you’re hiking through the wilderness or yanking weeds out of your backyard garden, there could be a tick nearby, eyeing you up like a juicy burger.

Do you know how to handle finding a tick on your clothes? Let’s test your knowledge with a little quiz.

You find a tick on your pant leg. You should:

1. Rip your pants off and throw them in the trash.
2. Douse yourself in gasoline and set yourself on fire.
3. Stumble into traffic and get hit by a truck.
4. Put them in the dryer for 6 minutes.

If you chose #4, you answered correctly. Though, the other options are tempting at the time.

According to a new study in the journal Ticks and Tick-borne Diseases, 6 minutes of spinning in a dryer will kill any ticks on clothes and help prevent tick-related illnesses.

The CDC recommends washing them first – which I’d probably do – and then drying them for an hour.

For as tiny as they are, ticks are serious business. In the U.S., tick bites cause an estimated 300,000 Lyme-disease infections every year, along with several other diseases, according to the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases in Colorado.

For the study, the researchers – who must have nerves and guts of steel – washed and dried hundreds of lab-raised black-legged ticks and immature nymphs, 5 at a time, in cloth bags in residential washers and dryers in Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts. The insects that survived were dried with wet towels at the low and high heat. They placed the control ticks in containers at room temperature.

In a separate experiment, bugs were dried – without pre-washing – with dry towels at various temperatures. [1]

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