How do you know you’ve been bitten by a tick? Afterward, clean the bite area and your hands with rubbing alcohol or soap and water, the CDC recommends. The CDC offers step-by-step instructions, including a Tick Bite Bot that walks you through removing a tick and seeking care. She also said never to use Vaseline or a match or any item mentioned in other old wives’ tales to remove a tick. Never crush a tick, and don’t grab the tick by the midsection or you risk squeezing its contents back into your body, Bartholomay said. Use tweezers to get a firm grip where it’s attached and firmly but steadily pull upward without jerking. You should remove the tick, but be sure to remove the whole organism, including the mouthparts. What do you do if you find a tick on yourself? But if you’ve been out for several hours or few days, they could have migrated anywhere, so have a friend or family member check your back and hairline as well. When checking yourself for ticks, look around your ankles or legs if you’ve been out a short time, Reiskind said. The insecticide permethrin on your clothes can also repel ticks. If you’ll be out longer, up to 25 percent is wise, or re-apply the repellent. The percentage of DEET determines how long it lasts, so if you’ll only be in ticks’ home for an hour or so, a lower percentage is fine, Reiskind says. Use a repellent that says it repels ticks, which includes those containing DEET. Since they’re usually looking for smaller animals, they’re often latching on somewhere from the waist down and then crawling up. ”I think there’s a little bit of a fear that ticks are going to drop out of the trees, and that’s not really how ticks work most of the time,” says Michael Reiskind, an entomologist at North Carolina State University. “If you’re walking through grassy or forested areas, wear long pants and long sleeve shirts, and then you check your clothes and skin for ticks when you come back,” Timothy Brewer, an infectious disease physician and epidemiologist at the University of California Los Angeles says.īartholomay also recommends wearing light-colored clothing so it’s easier to see ticks, and tucking your pants into your socks so they can’t crawl up your pant leg. The two keys are wearing the right clothes and using repellent when in areas with ticks. Here’s what to know to protect yourself from ticks and what to do if you’re bit. “We should just really try not to feed the bloodsuckers either.” “When you’re out in the wild and you see those signs that say ’Don’t feed the animals,’ they mean don’t feed the bear and rodents, but I think that should apply to the invertebrates too,” Bartholomay says. The best way to avoid a tick-borne disease is, obviously, not to get bitten by a tick. “Tick activity will ramp up as the temperatures rise, and if we have an early spring, then it’s going to seem bad because suddenly we’re seeing ticks at a time of year where we haven’t seen them before.” They might be worse this year because it warmed up sooner than it has in previous years. ”This is this is the time of year where, in lots of parts of the United States, a lot of people are getting exposed to ticks,” Lyric Bartholomay, an entomologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says. Several states’ health officials are already warning of a particularly bad year for ticks, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported earlier this year that cases of the tick-borne disease babesiosis have been rising. Warmer springs and longer summers means a longer tick season. As people enjoy the outdoors this summer, they should remember they’re not the only ones taking advantage of the warm weather.
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