Contact

Last updated: August 30, 2026

All About Ticks is written and maintained by one person, Phillip George. Messages arrive in a single inbox and he reads all of them. This page gives you the address, explains what to include so that a reply is actually useful, and points you to the right service for the questions this site is not the right place to answer.

If you feel unwell, do not wait for a reply from us. We cannot assess symptoms, interpret test results, or judge whether a bite needs treatment. Fever, a spreading rash, a severe headache, or any illness that is getting worse after a tick bite is a reason to contact a clinician or your local public health service now. The CDC advises seeing a doctor if a rash or fever develops within several weeks of removing a tick (CDC — What to do after a tick bite).

Email

The address is assembled in your browser so that plain-text address harvesters miss it. With scripting turned off you will see the readable form above: replace [at] with an at sign and [dot] with a period.

We read every message and reply to most within a few days. Anything that requires re-checking a primary source takes longer, and in the middle of tick season it usually does. Some messages need no reply at all: send us a typo or a broken link and we will normally just fix the page.

Plain text is fine, and a short message with a link beats a long one without. Please keep attachments under a few megabytes, and please do not send anything you would not want sitting in an ordinary email inbox. We do not need your medical history to correct a page, and we would rather not receive it.

Corrections

Corrections come first. If a page is wrong, out of date, or unclear enough to mislead someone, that outranks everything else in the inbox. Read the Corrections Policy for how we weigh evidence, and send:

The page URL, or the page title if the URL is awkward to copy.
The exact sentence or figure you believe is wrong. Quoting it saves us guessing.
What you think it should say instead.
A source. A public health agency page, a state or provincial health authority, a university extension service, or a paper with a DOI carries the most weight.

What happens after you send one

We check the claim against the source you sent and against the source already cited on the page.
If the page is wrong, we edit it, update the visible "Last updated" date, and note the change in the page's "What changed in this update" block where the page has one.
If the evidence is genuinely mixed, we usually rewrite the passage to describe the disagreement and cite both sides rather than pick a winner.
If we conclude the page is right, we reply and say why, with the source.

We do not publish reader names, and we do not credit correctors by name unless you ask us to.

General and media inquiries

For interview requests, permission to quote a page, or questions about how the site is put together, include your name, the outlet or organisation if there is one, what you need, and your deadline. Short factual questions about the site itself, such as which source a figure came from, are welcome and usually quick to answer.

You may quote short passages from the site with a link back. Please do not republish whole pages. Where we summarise CDC or Public Health Agency of Canada material, that agency is the source you should credit and link, not us.

Advertising

Advertising on All About Ticks is served programmatically through Google AdSense, so there is no ad inventory to buy from us directly and no rate card to request. See the Advertising Disclosure for how ads are separated from editorial content and the Privacy Policy for what advertising cookies do. We do not accept paid links, sponsored posts, guest articles, or paid placements inside articles, and messages offering them do not get a reply.

What we can and cannot help with

We can

Fix factual errors and out-of-date guidance.
Tell you which source a statement on the site came from.
Point you to the official authority for your province or state.
Explain what a page says in plainer language.

We cannot

Give medical or veterinary advice about an individual case.
Diagnose a rash, a bite, or a symptom, from a photo or a description.
Interpret lab results or recommend or rule out treatment.
Identify a tick species from a photo, or say whether a particular tick was infected.

Those limits are not modesty. Nobody here is a physician, a veterinarian, or an entomologist, and a stranger reading an email is a worse source of clinical judgement than the clinician who can look at you. For an animal, that means your veterinarian. For a person, that means a clinician or your local public health service.

Identifying a tick: send the photo elsewhere

Photo identification is a real service, and there are people qualified to do it. We are not those people, so please use them instead of emailing us.

In Canada: upload the photo to eTick.ca, a public platform where trained identifiers review submissions and report the species back to you.
In the United States: identification and testing services are organised state by state. Massachusetts, for example, lists its options on the state's tick identification and testing services page. Start with your state health department or your land-grant university's extension service.

Worth knowing before you pay for anything: the CDC does not recommend having the tick that bit you tested for pathogens, because commercial tick-testing laboratories are not held to clinical diagnostic standards, a positive result does not mean you were infected, a negative result can give false reassurance, and symptoms usually appear before results do (CDC — What to do after a tick bite). Species identification for your own understanding is a different thing, and that is what the services above are for.

If you are not sure which page you need, the tick removal guide covers what to do in the first few minutes, human diseases covers what to watch for afterwards, and the Canada and USA guides list the official authority for your region.