Bitten By A Tick: What To Do?

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

With the onset of the spring-summer season, summer residents have new far-reaching plans - to plant and grow a good harvest, have the most productive rest in the country, go to the forest for mushrooms and do a great many other important things. Ticks have their own plans for this period - to find gape of people and animals and attack them! But a tick bite can be very dangerous! What if the tick did bite?

Who are ticks and how are they dangerous?

Ticks are tiny parasitic insects belonging to the Arachnid class. And at the moment, science knows about 54,000 species of these disgusting scoundrels! The microscopic size makes it possible for ticks to easily settle in almost anywhere, so that you can encounter them anywhere and anytime - they begin to activate as soon as the thermometer rises to five degrees Celsius. The activity of these parasites continues until the very fall, until the thermometer again drops below the five-degree mark. As for the peak of tick attacks, it usually occurs between April and July.

Of course, not all ticks tolerate dangerous ailments - the share of truly dangerous insects is about ten percent. However, this is not at all a reason to lull your vigilance, because no one can guarantee that the meeting did not take place with a dangerous individual. In addition, the bite of even the most harmless tick can provoke a fairly strong and extremely unpleasant allergic reaction.

In the event that you are not lucky enough to meet with harmful ticks, you can become infected with such dangerous diseases as Lyme disease (it is also called ixodic tick-borne borreliosis), tick-borne encephalitis or hemorrhagic fever.

How do ticks bite?

Most often, ticks lie in wait for new victims in humid shady places (in low bushes or in the grass) - they do not like to be in the wind and in the sun. Clinging with their front legs to a person's clothes, malicious creatures are trying in every possible way to quickly get to one or another part of his skin: most of all ticks are attracted to the area behind the ears, neck, knee or elbow bends, as well as the groin area and armpits.

During the attack, the tick injects a special anesthetic substance into the human skin, which allows it to stick to the selected area almost imperceptibly for its victim. And as soon as the harmful insect sucks, it immediately begins to feed on blood, and if the males manage to get enough in an hour, then the females can take up to several days for this!

How to understand that a tick has bitten?

As a rule, for the first time, a person bitten by a tick begins to feel fatigue and discomfort only after two or three hours, and sometimes even later. And most often people start to beat the alarm only when their temperature rises and a fever or chills appear. At the same time, an increase in temperature is not always an indication that the tick turned out to be infected - thus, the aforementioned allergic reaction may also manifest.

Children and the elderly are especially difficult to tolerate tick bites - their lymph nodes may additionally increase and their blood pressure decrease.

What to do after being bitten?

The most important thing is to try to extract the harmful insect from the skin. And ideally, this should be done in the appropriate medical institution! If there is no way to get there, you will have to cope on your own. In this case, you will need to get some oily substance - solid oil, petroleum jelly or the most ordinary vegetable oil: these substances will help block the bloodsucker access to oxygen, which will greatly facilitate the process of its extraction. In this case, it is extremely important to immerse the whole mite in the oily substance! Then you should wait for a few minutes - during this time, the "grip" of the harmful parasite will noticeably weaken, and it will be possible to start removing it from the skin: for this, they gently grasp the tick body (you can do this with tweezers) and gradually "unscrew" it with very careful rotational movements him out of the skin. In no case should the insect's head remain in the wound! And in conclusion, the wound is treated with iodine or some other antiseptic at hand.

As for the tick itself, it is not thrown away, but placed in any sealed container and taken to the laboratory for an appropriate analysis - it is important to have time to do this within two days, and ideally the insect should be alive. It is important to take into account that the tick must be kept in a humid environment, that is, at least a couple of paper napkins moistened with water must be put in a container with it.

Prevention

Going to nature or to your favorite garden, it is important to try to observe certain safety measures: treat both clothes and skin with special protective equipment, and also tuck trousers into boots. It is better to choose light-colored clothes, while ideally both a shirt and a jacket should be equipped with tight-fitting collars. And, of course, periodically it is necessary to examine your skin and clothes for the appearance of ticks on them!

And the best way of prevention will still be vaccination - as a rule, a regular injection guarantees protection for a year, and additional vaccination allows you to extend the safety guarantee for another three years.

Have you ever encountered ticks?