You will probably not see a tick if it sticks to a blade of grass, but it can see you. The small parasites are opportunists who spend their days waiting for people, dogs and other mammals to brush against them, so that they can joined the exposed skin and feed on blood. While the climate heats up and Spread tick populationsThere is a good chance that In many parts of the USYou will get to know intimate this summer.
Most people It will be bitten by a tick will be fine, says Michel Shamoon-Pour, a molecular anthropologist at Binghamton University Tick-Borne Disease Center in New York. But a small percentage develops serious symptoms related to Lyme disease and other diseases, including anaplasmosis and babesiosis. “The best thing you can do is avoid a tick bite, if you find a tap, remove it quickly and safely,” says Shamoon-Pour. “That is the closest to us not to worry about diagnosing or treating an infection. Just put an end before it starts.”
Tick removal requires technology – and if you do not do this correctly, you can increase your risk of infection. We asked experts to remove the best and worst ways to remove a tick.
Best: use tweezers
The worst: use your fingers or tweezers with a wide tip
Ticks are remarkably small-many are no larger than a poppy seed, says Shamoon-Pour. For example, adult henten signs are about 1/10 inch if they are not swollen. If you go at the back with your big, clumsy fingers or a big tweezers, you will probably grab the body of the tap – and that is one of the most important mistakes that experts report that people make. About …
Best: Grab the mouth of the sign
The worst: go after his body
When you are ready to remove a sign from your body (or that from someone else), use your tweezers to close his mouth, what the part digs in your skin. Don’t grab the whole body. If you do that, you will ultimately squeeze it, “and our concern is the potential presence of pathogens,” says Shamoon-Pour. “If you press the tick, you will actually empty what is in his body, including potential pathogens, in your skin.”
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Once you have clamped on the mouthpiece of the tap, pull the straight up with steady, even pressure. Then clean the affected area with disinfection alcohol and wash your hands with soap and water or disinfectant.
The best: if the sign breaks, leave his mouth or legs there
The worst: dig around for persistent pieces
Sometimes a tick breaks into pieces while you remove it, and his mouthpiece or legs remain in your skin. (You can usually tell it because you still see a small black dot where it was attached.) Leave those remains there when this happens. “To be honest, it’s no problem,” says Shamoon-Pour. “It is clearly coarse, but things like this happen.” Your body does not like strange objects, he adds, and within a few days your skin has expressed it.
The best: stay with the Pincete removal technology
The worst: try to stifle or burn the tick
People often fall for so -called drawing removals such as the use of a match to burn the parasite or to nip with petroleum jelly, nail polish or a kind of harmful substance. “We can assure you that the tick will certainly not fall,” says Shamoon-Pour. “None of these things will work.” Moreover, playing with fire can of course cause burns to be much more serious than a connecting tick.
The best: rinse it or stifle it with tape
The worst: crush it dead
Ticks can be difficult to kill. Once you have removed one, wrap it firmly in tape so that it does not get oxygen and it in the garbage dump, says Dr. Amy Duckro, a specialist in infectious diseases at Kaiser Permanente in Colorado. You can also immerse it in disinfection alcohol or flush the toilet. Whatever you do, do not crush the tick: potentially infected blood, guts and saliva can pour out, which makes you a risk of sick.
Best: if you prefer to keep the tick, in case, keep it in a sealed container
The worst: Send it immediately for testing
Lee Ann Sporn, a biology professor at Paul Smith’s College in New York, makes many phone calls from people asking if they should send their tap to a research laboratory to have it tested for infection after it has bitten them. She orders it (Advice reflected by the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). There are a few reasons for that: “One is that even if the tick does show evidence of something that causes disease, this certainly does not mean that you are taking the disease,” she says. “It is not absolute and it can lead to over treatment.” On the other hand, if the tick is negative for illness, “this does not mean that you are at home,” says Sporn. “If you were bitten by one tick, you might be bitten by several and you were not aware.” Moreover, many laboratories for testing tick tests do not have sufficient quality control, she adds, and the results are not diagnostic quality.
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Experts agree that throwing away a tick immediately after you have removed it is a safe gamble. That said, if you are particularly worried about the tick bite, you have another option: you can put the tick in disinfecting alcohol and then drop it in a sealed container or plastic bag and keep it in your freezer. That way, when you eventually get sick, you can show it to your doctor for a good visual identification, says Sporn. She also recommends taking a picture of the tick bite and the tick itself. You then have a handy, dated documentation for future reference. “Let’s say you develop a fever and flu -like symptoms a few weeks later, and a doctor asks:” Are you bitten by a tick? “” She says. “You have that record and you can say,” Yes, I was on this day, and this is how the tick looked like. ” That is really useful information. “
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