A Quick Catch: Tick Drag Nets Results
It didn’t take long to find the first few ticks in a daylong tick hunt in Quince Orchard Park Tuesday.
Dr. Ahmed Kilani of Clogen Laboratories in Gaithersburg looks at a tiny tick collected at Quince Orchard Park and stored in a test tube.
Dr. Ahmed Kilani, president of Clongen Laboratories of Gaithersburg, is on the hunt to find out if his neighborhood has a tick problem. He has 15 spots picked out to do the drag which consists of using a white sheet attached to a pole that is literally dragged along grassy areas and checked for ticks.
His first spot was off of Winter Walk Drive in the part of the neighborhood that backs up to the National Institute of Standards and Technology property. There he and his lab-coated partners in the effort found five ticks. Each was put into a test tube and labeled.
Kilani said he will test the ticks for borrelia burgdorferi (Lyme disease), babesi species and anaplasma phagocytophilum- three common tick-borne diseases. The results may take a few weeks. He’ll do the testing at his own laboratory that specializes in testing ticks for diseases.
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Counting Ticks: Gaithersburg Doctor Plans Tick Drag in Quince Orchard Park
Dr. Ahmed Kilani gets about 25 ticks a day. They come to him in plastic baggies, via FedEx trucks and even hand delivered. That’s because his company Clongen Laboratories in Gaithersburg is one of the premier labs in the country that tests, label and catalogs ticks’ DNA for diseases like Lyme. Lately, tick bites in […]
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