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Preventing tick bites is really important, especially in the spring and early summer
when ticks come out.
Ticks are very small.
They're actually arachnids, so they're related to mites and spiders.
In the nymph and adult forms, they have eight legs, just like spiders do.
The nymphs are about the size of poppy seeds and the adults may be about the size of a sesame seed.
When they're not engorged and they're just crawling around or when they first bite you,
they could be small and dark brown or black, but once they've been feeding on your blood
for a while, they can become gray and about the size of a raisin.
Ticks usually like to bite people
in kind of warm places on the body with thin, soft skin.
So once they make their way onto a person,
they'll kind of climb around until they get to some place friendly
like the hairline where you might not find them or behind
the knees or inside the armpits.
Sometimes inside the groin too.
Often when you see that you're bit by a tick, you'll see the tick still attached.
Once ticks latch on, they don't like to let go until they're fully engorged and they fall off.
If you find a tick attached to you, the first thing you want to do is remove it as soon as
possible and you want to do that with tweezers ideally.
So you get some clean tweezers and then you grab the tick as close to your skin as
possible and pull straight out.
You don't want to do any wiggling or twisting, which might break
the tick body off of the mouth.
Then you want to wash the site with soap and water.
You want to check the rest of your body for ticks to make sure you don't have ticks elsewhere.
Take a shower, wash the rest of the ticks off if there are any
and you can contact your doctor.
Tell your doctor about where the tick was on your body, where you got bit geographically
and if you know what it looked like, you can describe it.
A tick has to be attached to you in order to transmit infection.
If a tick is just crawling on you though, you probably want to check the rest of your body and make sure there isn't
one attached somewhere else.
The most common one that people have probably heard of is Lyme disease,
which we do have here, although it's not common.
Anaplasmosis, Ehrlichiosis, Babesiosis, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever
is something that sometimes people may think about,
so there's a good number.
So different tick-borne infections take different amounts of time to spread from the tick.
Lyme disease, for example. A tick needs to be attached
for about 36 hours at a minimum in order to spread the infection from the tick to the person.
By that time, you would see that the tick is engorged and doesn't look like what you would
expect it to look like, so you would know that it's been attached for a while.
Other infections can take as little as 15 minutes to be spread by ticks.
So it ticks are really common in grassy areas where there's a lot of tall grass, where they
can hide.
Also near water and where you might find other small animals like mice, rats, sometimes deer.
One of the best things to do is just avoid going into those grassy areas where there can be a lot of
ticks. If you have to go into those areas or just want to because you're going hiking or something,
something you should do is wear clothes that fully cover your skin.
You want to tuck your pants into your socks if you can, wear long sleeve shirts.
Also wear light colored clothing so that if a tick ends up on you, you can find it easily.
You can also wear insect repellent, which is good.
You might want to put that on your clothes and on your skin
and then when you have a pet that you might take out with you, make sure you check them for
ticks and brush them when you get home.
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