The best way to deal with a deadly disease is to not get sick with it. But avoiding a disease can depend on how it’s spread, where you live or what you do for a living, and the possibility for a protective vaccine.
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Control efforts
Because it was known that ticks carried RMSF, one way to eradicate the disease was to keep people from getting bitten by infected ticks. That could mean changing the way that ranchers, shepherds, woodsmen, and others did their jobs.
There was another approach to tick control: eradicating the rodents and other small animals in an area where RMSF outbreaks occurred, often by using poison. The attempt to eradicate small animals in areas infested with RMSF failed; it wasn’t clear which animal or animals gave the infections to ticks, and new animals kept moving in.
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To protect the workers most in contact with animals that could harbor ticks, Dr. Robert Cooley, the Montana State Entomologist and head Entomologist at the Canyon Creek Schoolhouse laboratory, recommended dipping livestock in disinfectants to kill the ticks, as was being done in this photo.
