Avoid Tick Bites!
1. Avoid Areas with Lots of Ticks.
• Avoid wooded and bushy areas with high grass and leaf litter.
• Take extra precautions late spring through early fall when ticks that transmit disease are active.
• Walk in the center of the trail when in the woods or high grass.
• Ask your local health department and park or extension service about tick infested areas to avoid.
Keep Ticks off Your Skin.
• Apply insect repellent with 20% DEET or more on skin and clothing when you go outdoors (for kids too!). Don’t spray repellent on skin under clothing.
• Permethrin sprayed on clothing kills ticks on contact and provides protection through several washings. Don’t use permethrin on skin.
• Cover up! Wear long pants, long sleeves, and long socks.
Light-colored clothing will help you spot ticks more easily. Tucking pant legs into socks or boots and tucking shirts into pants help keep ticks on the outside of clothing.
2. Perform Tick Checks!
• Remove ticks from your clothes before going indoors. Wash your clothes with hot water and dry them using high heat for at least one hour.
• Check your body and your child’s body for ticks after being outdoors, even in your own yard. Use a mirror to view all parts of your body (in armpits, behind ears, in groin, etc.) and remove any ticks you find.
3. Control Ticks around Your Home and in Your Community
*Create Tick-Safe Zones. Many infections happen in your own yard! Remove leaf litter and brush around your home and at the edges of lawns. Place wood chips or gravel between lawns and wooded areas. Mow the lawn and clear brush regularly. Keep playground equipment, decks and patios away from yard edges and trees. Apply pesticide to control ticks.
Recognize the Symptoms!
People of all ages can be infected. There is no vaccine currently available to prevent Lyme disease or most other tick-borne diseases, so early detection and treatment are important. Most tick-borne diseases can be treated successfully. Early detection and treatment can prevent more serious illness.
Early symptoms of tick-borne diseases may include:
•Fever •Headache •Fatigue •Rash
See a health care provider if you develop these symptoms after a tick bite.
First aid
In general, the best way to remove adult Ixodidae is mechanically. To facilitate prompt removal, fine-tipped tweezers can be used to grasp the tick as close to the skin as possible and detach it by applying a steady upward force without crushing, jerking or twisting, in such a way as to avoid leaving behind mouthparts or provoking regurgitation of infective fluids into the wound. Proprietary tick removal tools are also available. It is important to disinfect the bite area thoroughly after removal of the tick. The tick can be stored and, in case of signs or symptoms of a subsequent infection, shown to a clinician for identification purposes together of details of where and when the bite occurred. If the tick’s head and mouthparts are not attached to the body after removal, it may be necessary to perform a punch biopsy to remove any parts remaining inside the patient.
Tick-borne Diseases
Tick-borne illnesses are cauded by infection with a variety of pathogens, including ricettsia and other types of bacteria, viruses, and protozoa. Because ticks can harbor more than one disease-causing agent, patients can be infected with more than one pathogen at the same time, compounding the difficulty in diagnosis and treatment. Major tick-borne diseases include Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, relapsing fever, tularemia, tick-borne meningoencephalitis, Colorado tick fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, babesiosis and cytauxzoonosis.
Tick bites may also induce a delayed allergy to red meat.
Tick eggs can be infected with pathogens inside the ovaries, meaning that baby ticks can be infectious immediately at birth, before feeing on their first host.
Please call immediately if you find a Tick on your body or have been bitten by a Tick.
Information provided by the Center for Disease Control: www.cdc.gov
Other information provided by Wickipedia website: www.wikipedia.com
