Gerry DeSeve, of Chestnut Hill, and his son Dean, 12, a student at Germantown Friends School, have created a product they say will prevent Lyme disease. (Photos by Len Lear)

by Len Lear

You mat not be aware of it, but May is Lyme Disease Awareness Month in the U.S. According to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Pennsylvania had 8,988 confirmed cases of Lyme disease in 2016, the most recent year for which statistics are available on the CDC website. This total was far more than any other state in the country. The closest state was New Jersey with 3,332 confirmed cases. (No one knows how many other cases of Lyme disease go unreported to medical professionals, but it is assumed that the number is huge.)

Lyme disease is caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi and is transmitted to humans through the bite of infected ticks. Typical symptoms include fever, headache, fatigue and a characteristic skin rash. If left untreated, infection can spread to joints, the heart and nervous system with horrific consequences. Lyme disease is diagnosed based on symptoms, physical findings (e.g., rash) and the possibility of exposure to infected ticks.

For Dean DeSeve, 12, a Chestnut Hill resident and student at Germantown Friends School, Lyme disease is not just something studied in a textbook. Three years ago he caught it in his backyard, which is next to Morris Arboretum. “I had a bull's eye rash on my back,” he said. “It started out the size of a coin. Fortunately, we caught it really early, under one month, so the symptoms did not last that long.

“Then, last summer I got it again. I noticed the same giant bull's eye rash. I was at summer camp by Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains (New York state). It was way too big for a normal bug bite. I had to take these big antibiotic pills twice every day for a month.”

Dean and his dad, Gerry, 46, who has an engineering degree from Carnegie-Mellon University, decided to show the ticks they mean business by finding a way to prevent Lyme disease. They searched the internet to see if there was already a solution out there for Lyme disease, but the closest thing they would find was a mosquito bracelet, which is made of neoprene and rubber. However, in early 2015 the Federal Trade Commission charged a manufacturer of mosquito repellent wrist bands with “making deceptive, unsubstantiated claims” regarding the effectiveness of their product. And there is no evidence that they work with ticks.

So for the last two years Gerry and Dean have tried out nine prototypes of washable “Tick Bands” for which they have obtained a provisional patent. “We did it as a sort of hobby,” said Gerry. Tick Bands use “Thermoflage” technology developed by the U.S. Army that enables soldiers to hide from night vision goggles — technology that also makes people less visible to ticks.

Wearing the tick bands around the ankles and over the pants when you walk in the woods will eliminate the possibility of exposure to infected ticks, the father/son team insists.

According to Gerry, the Tick Bands, which are wrapped around the bottom of a pair of pants before walking into an area where ticks are likely to thrive, protect the user in three ways: They seal pants (making them look like the pegged pants from the 1950s) by wrapping them with webbing and Velcro closures.

Secondly, their patent-pending “Thermoflage” solution makes the bottom of pants look cold and dark, the opposite of what ticks look for when hunting prey, which is heat and light. It is said to “stop ticks from thinking you are a good host.” Thirdly, each Tick Band has a detachable pad for applying insect repellent (some repellents are eco-friendly), “which keeps chemicals off of the skin and out of the laundry machines.”

Gerry and Dean have started a crowdsourcing campaign on indiegogo.com, hoping to raise $10,000. The campaign started May 5 and will last one month. As of May 12 they had raised $2,635 from 42 backers. The money will be used “for my college fund and to make more Tick Bands,” said Dean.

So far Gerry and Dean have made a couple hundred Tick Bands one-by-one with a sewing machine that makes 42 stitches in six seconds. They have given them out as Christmas gifts. They can be purchased on their indiegogo site for $10 a pair. They are hoping, of course, for eventual large-scale commercial production by MISC Products in Michigan, whose customers include Tesla, General Motors and the Department of Defense.

Gerry is an inventor who has launched other new products, has filed three patents and was a vice-president of business development for a Fortune 500 company. He and his wife, Jennifer Torpie, 45, a Mt. Airy native, were in the same GFS graduating class in 1990. In addition to Dean, other family members are cats Bobo and Simon and dogs Bates and Bjorn. Their house used to be a car barn and stable.

For more information, visit www.tick-bands.com or email gerry@tick-bands.com.