#TICK BITES HOW TO#
#TICK BITES SKIN#

#TICK BITES SKIN#

They hang out on blades of grass or in trees, and then when you brush past they will hitch a lift, find a nice warm bit of skin where the blood is close to surface, and chow down. They’re not noisy, like mosquitoes, and you won’t yelp in pain when they bite, as you do when an ant takes a piece of you. Wash the clothes you’ve been wearing too. Give yourself – and your children and pets – a check each day if you’re camping, and when you get home from whatever outdoor adventure you’ve been enjoying. The best defence is vigilance – check yourself (and your nearest and dearest, if they’re out with you) over carefully when you’re hiking, biking, canoodling or camping in an area where ticks might be present. Always be careful when using chemicals and read the label carefully. This will help dissuade ticks from choosing you as a host, but it’s not a suit of armor, and if you’re running or walking in the heat, you will sweat it off fairly quickly.

You can also spray yourself and your clothes with insect repellant that includes an active ingredient like DEET. When camping, it can be a good idea to wear lighter colors, as ticks show up on these clothes better, and you can catch them before they get on your skin. Wearing long-sleeved base layers and mid layers, long pants, long hiking socks (tucked into your long pants for that really cool look) and running tights can all help reduce the risk of a tick latching onto you, but this won’t eliminate the possibility altogether, and sometimes it’s just not practical or comfortable to wrap yourself right up, especially in the height of summer. It does help, though, if you stick to trails, instead of bush bashing your way through free-growing flora (you should avoid doing this from a Leave no Trace point of view anyway), where ticks can drop onto you easily. There is always the option of avoiding places where ticks hang out, but unfortunately they are often present in the places we all like to play in – woodlands, forests, fields, grasslands, moor, riverbanks – and we don’t think for a moment you should stop exploring such wonderful wild environments.

#TICK BITES HOW TO#

Long sleeves and repellents help to keep ticks at bay (Image credit: Getty) How to avoid getting bitten by ticks If you are bitten, it can be useful to clock which variety of tick is responsible, but it’s even better to know how to avoid tick bites in the first place, how to deal with them when they happen, and what to look for afterwards in terms of warning signs that you may have contracted something more serious than an itchy bump. Which, if you enjoy pulling on your hiking shoes and trail running shoes, or grabbing your mountain bike or going off on a camping trip, you almost certainly do. And herein lies the problem, because they dine exclusively on the blood of other animals – including deer, dogs, mice, me and you – if we venture into their domain. In Australia there are 75 kinds of ticks, the most unpleasant of which is the aptly named paralysis tick, and in Britain there are 20 varieties of tick, which can all potentially impart various ailments no body wants, including Lyme disease.Īll ticks start off small – nymphs are like poppy seeds, while adults have bodies about the size of a grain of rice – but they can grow considerably when they’ve had a good feed. Wood ticks and dog ticks, found across much of North America, are known for spreading Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Ixodes scapularis, for example – the main culprit for infecting people with Lyme disease where it occurs, across the eastern and northern Midwest of the United States, and in southeastern Canada – is known to its enemies by various names, including blacklegged tick, bear tick and deer tick.

There are numerous types of tick, and each sub species has a range of colloquial names that vary according to where you are in the world.

Tick bites