The long-awaited spring days have come when you can go to nature. But we must not forget that there, in the forest or in the glades, during the warm season of the year, small blood-sucking insects - ticks - are waiting for humans and all warm-blooded animals.
A tick bite can turn into a serious infectious disease - encephalitis. The consequences of a bite of this carrier of infection are more than deplorable: paralysis, deafness, death. The probability of meeting a bear in a forest on an area of 1 square kilometer is negligible, but there can be counted thousands of ticks on the same area. Of course, of the entire hordes of infectious ticks, no more than 5%, but the fact is that the infected tick does not differ in appearance from the usual, uninfected tick. Therefore, one has to fear all the ticks. But many do not know "in person" this dangerous insect and do not know what a tick bite looks like.
The tick does not bite at lightning speed, like a bee or wasp. He will not warn of his presence by hissing like a snake, or a ringing mosquito sound. First, he crawls along clothes, a headdress or an uncovered head, then he looks for the most suitable, in his opinion, place on the skin. If you are attentive to your feelings, you can feel the insect on the body and remove it in time.
Usually ticks bite where the skin is the thinnest. The tick bites slowly, its bite is almost not felt - simultaneously with biting the skin, the insect anesthetizes the wound with a special substance. The pictures in the article show how the tick bite looks, which will be felt when the tick begins to energetically fill its body with blood, as if screwing its head deeper and deeper. Around him, the skin turns red, the sensation can be compared with the beginning abscess - itching and burning around the bite.
Encephalitis tick bite cannot be distinguished externally. A tick is infected or not, it can only be determined in the sanitary surveillance laboratory if the removed insect is delivered there alive (in a glass jar with a lid where you need to put a piece of cloth moistened with water).
Do not bring four-legged friends - dogs with you to rest in the forest. Dog hair is an excellent mite store. The dog will bring a lot of ticks from the walk, both crawling into her body and crawling, and will lose them around your home. What a tick bite looks like on a dog, you can see in the photo.
A biting tick cannot be crushed, pulled out sharply. It is necessary to fill in the parasite and place around it with kerosene, fat, oil and wait a bit (20-30 minutes). Very often, after such treatment, the tick disappears by itself. If this method does not help, try another: grab the tick with gauze-wrapped fingers or tweezers. In smooth slow movements, try to remove it, being careful not to cut off the proboscis. Or around the head of the tick they tighten a loop of thread that pulls out a sucking insect. If the proboscis or even the head of the tick comes off and these elements remain in the wound with a black mark, then the skin turns blue around the site of the bite, then it turns very red towards the edges of the spot, swells, itches, and a burning sensation appears - this is what the tick bite looks like, which could not be removed completely.
You need to know that not only encephalitis, but also other diseases (for example, borreliosis, otherwise called Lyme disease) is a tick bite. Signs of diseases do not affect immediately, but after a week or two or even later: a headache in the frontotemporal temporal regions, high fever, cramps, and vomiting. In
Lyme disease (aka borreliosis), the bite site begins to redden and swell in the form of a circle, covering a significant area of the skin. The edges of this circle are marked in red.
The most appropriate measures will be preventative - vaccination against tick-borne encephalitis. If there is no vaccination, consult a doctor immediately after a tick bite. Follow hygiene measures: after the tick has been successfully removed, wash your hands with soap and water, treat the bite site with brilliant green, alcohol, iodine.