Archive for the ‘Ticks’ Category

How to Tell If a Tick Head is Still in Your Skin

https://www.self.com/story/tick-head-in-skin

Here’s How to Tell If a Tick Head Is Still in Your Skin, According to Doctors

And how to safely remove all of it ASAP.

By Kathryn Watson

Medically reviewed by Samantha G. Stoler, MD

digital collage showing closeup of legs and a line drawing of a tick
If a tick head is still in your skin, you’ll want to remove it carefully.Photo by Karyme França from Pexels / Tick drawing by Hein Nouwens via Getty Images / Design by Amanda K Bailey

You’re out hiking, breathing in the fresh air, taking in the sounds of nature—ticks are the furthest thing from your mind. That is until you see a brown tick butt sticking out from your skin. Maybe you immediately rip it off, only to wonder, How can I tell if a tick head is still in my skin?

If this is you, don’t panic. We‘ve got answers ahead. But first, let’s talk about ticks. We’re seeing an uptick in these tiny, insect-like parasites that feed off people and warm-blooded animals due to the growing populations of two of their favorite hosts: deer and mice. That may be good for ticks—they definitely have their place in a healthy, natural ecosystem—but that healthy place is not on your body. After all, ticks can transmit pathogens when they latch onto you. Over the past ten years, according to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, there has been a surge in Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses, many of which can cause severe complications if they aren’t diagnosed and treated.  (See link for article)

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SUMMARY:

  • An attached tick typically stays put for anywhere from 3 days to two weeks. The longer it is attached, the greater your risk for infection, so getting it off safely and promptly is important.
  • While the article recommends the CDC’s method of using tweezers for tick removal, I recommend a special tick removal device.  Go here for a review of products. Some can even be put on your key-chain which is handy in a pinch.
  • It’s important to NOT squeeze the tick or crush it as the fluids could transmit infection.
  • Some states offer free tick testing.  You can save the tick and have it tested for pathogens.  Wisconsin does not have such a service, which is really unfortunate, but tick testing is not without error.
  • Dermatologists recommend using a magnifying glass to make sure you haven’t left any body parts.  If the skin is firm, red, irritated, and has a lump, the tick may be embedded deeper.  You may need a dermagologist to surgically remove it with a punch biopsy tool.
  • The dermatologist states that “most tick bite end up being harmless.”  Where he derives this is beyond me.  Take each and every tick bite as seriously as a heart attack.  This crud can derail your life.
  • He also states you don’t need to call your doctor right away.  I COMPLETELY DISAGREE.  Call!  Immediately!  Get on prophylactic antibiotics/antimicrobials asap.  The risk of a life-debilitating illness just isn’t worth it.  Do NOT take the “wait and see approach.”
  • I highly recommend the article: Help! I Got Bit By a Tick!  What Do I do?
  • For prevention:  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2019/04/12/tick-prevention-2019/
  • Excellent Resource on steps to take if you are bitten by a tick:  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2020/04/21/help-i-got-bit-by-a-tick-what-do-i-do/

Category:

Activism, Lyme, Testing, Ticks, Treatment

British Columbia CDC Updates Info on Lyme Disease

https://www.castanet.net/news/BC/369932/BCCDC-releases-map-of-risk-areas-where-people-could-contract-Lyme-disease

BCCDC releases map of risk areas where people could contract Lyme disease

Lyme disease areas listed
Rob Gibson – May 25, 2022

The British Columbia Centre for Disease Control has updated its information on Lyme disease in the province.

The agency has published a map of the areas considered risk zones for Lyme disease.

“It’s certainly an update, and contradicts much of what doctors have been telling patients throughout the province for years,” said Jim Wilson, president and founder of the Canadian Lyme Disease Foundation.

Wilson says the BCCDC was behind the times and he’s glad to see they have updated their information.

“Saying these areas are not at risk for Lyme disease (in the past), is just not the case and hasn’t been the case for decades.”

(See link for article)

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**Comment**

Wilson, a patient himself, states the main reason for the long-overdue update was due to pressure by his organization.

And this, my friends, is the only way we make progress.  By doing it ourselves.

Wilson also warns that an important underlying issue that isn’t being discussed is the fact ticks are possibly everywhere due to migrating birds transporting them globally.  He states Revelstoke, Golden, and Banff which aren’t highlighted by the BCCDC map should be.

Please check out prevention and removal methods on his website, as well as many other resources.

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Category:

Activism, Lyme, Prevention, Ticks

News Report: Tiny Terror – The Truth About Ticks

https://www.localsyr.com/living-with-lyme/living-with-lyme-tiny-terror/  News Video Here (Approx. 24 Min)

Tiny Terror: The Truth About Ticks

by: ,

Updated:

SYRACUSE, N.Y. (WSYR-TV) Ticks are in our yards and they’re saturating Central New York. One bite can change everything. Most people do not know Central New York is an epicenter for tick-borne disease. Most recent data indicates a 439% increase in Central New York between 2008 and 2018.

What are some of the symptoms of Lyme disease?

  • Brain fog
  • Headaches
  • Joint Pain
  • Extreme Fatigue
Doctors and scientists struggle to agree on how to get this under control.

(See link for video and story)

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SUMMARY:

  • The reason Lyme/MSIDS patients are not treated appropriately is due to the faulty, unscientific, and fraudulent CDC Lyme guidelines which serve as an Iron Curtain in the medical community.
  • It is imperative to get to a Lyme literate (LLMD) doctor trained by ILADS, a group of medical professionals who recognize the faulty, unreliable testing and ineffective CDC guidelines.
  • The quote from a doctor in the news story that taking a single or double dose of doxycycline reducing the risk of transmission has been completely and utterly debunked.
    • Based on animal studies, ILADS recommends that known blacklegged tick bites be treated with 20 days of doxycycline (barring any contraindications).
    • Given the low success rates in trials treating EM rashes for 20 or fewer days, ILADS recommends that patients receive 4-6 weeks of doxycycline, amoxicillin or cefuroxime. A minimum of 21 days of azithromycin is also acceptable, especially in Europe. All patients should be reassessed at the end of their initial therapy and, when necessary, antibiotic therapy should be extended.
    • ILADS recommends that patients with persistent symptoms and signs of Lyme disease be evaluated for other potential causes before instituting additional antibiotic therapy.
    • ILADS recommends antibiotic retreatment when a chronic Lyme infection is judged to be a possible cause of the ongoing manifestations and the patient has an impaired quality of life.
  • Lyme survivor Brenna Osmun, who lost her ability to walk, is interviewed on the report.  Two months of IV antibiotics saved her life. She suffered years of relapses until she saw a LLMD, a specialist rarely covered by insurance.  She also had Babesia and Bartonella and was treated with more than a dozen herbs and antibiotics.  She says this to patients:

“It gets better. It really, really does. And my life changed for the better I wanna say. Even though I was really sick, it does get better. And having that support really helps you. Don’t give up. Please don’t give up. I didn’t and I’m still alive.” ~ Brenna Osmu

  • Executive Director of the Central New York Lyme and Tick-Borne Disease Alliance, Royale Scuderi became infected years ago when doctors treating this were scarce.  She had to drive to Long Island for year to get appropriately treated.
  • Journalist and host of the news program, Nicole Sommavilla became septic with her organs shutting down.  Years later she was diagnosed with Lyme disease and required a dozen drugs to treat Lyme, Babesia, and Anaplasmosis

“I went from years of oral medications and injections to just one medication I’m on now and just a lot of maintenance with diet and knowing when not to push myself past my limit, it’s a lot of self-awareness.” ~ Nicole Sommavilla

A MESSAGE FROM NICOLE:

If you’re fighting Lyme right now, please don’t give up.

Don’t quit in the darkness. Most days it may feel easier to give in, but hang on. Lean into your support system and keep fighting. Because joy and healing are coming. ~ Nicola Sommavilla

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Category:

Activism, Lyme, Ticks, Treatment

Sacramento Mom Shares Struggle with Lyme Disease

https://www.kcra.com/article/sacramento-mom-shares-struggle-with-lyme-disease/40186366

‘No one could figure out what was wrong’: Sacramento mom shares struggle with Lyme disease

Lyme Fight Foundation educates people suffering from Lyme disease
Brian Hickey

SACRAMENTO, Calif. —

A Sacramento mom is sharing her struggle with Lyme disease in hopes of helping others who may be undiagnosed and suffering from the chronic symptoms of the disease.

Melissa Moya has formed the Lyme Fight Foundation, dedicated to educating people who have Lyme disease and to help protect those who don’t.

(See link for article, transcript and News Video)

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Category:

Activism, Lyme, Ticks

The History of Lyme Disease Has a Wisconsin Chapter. It’s Still Being Written

https://wisconsinwatch.org/2022/03/the-history-of-lyme-disease-has-a-wisconsin-chapter-its-still-being-written

The history of Lyme disease has a Wisconsin chapter. It’s still being written.

From the first case documented by a Milwaukee dermatologist to ongoing research at the University of Wisconsin, the state has played a big role in Lyme disease.
by Zhen Wang / Wisconsin Watch
Xia Lee, a postdoctoral vector biologist in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Entomology, shows an adult black-legged tick, in the Susan Paskewitz Lab in Madison, Wis., on Sept. 21, 2021. Lyme disease in Wisconsin has grown as the black-legged ticks that cause the disease have spread across the state. (Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Watch)
Reading Time: 3 minutes Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit newsroom that focuses on government integrity and quality of life issues. Sign up for our newsletter for more stories straight to your inbox.In 1970, a Wisconsin dermatologist first documented what would soon be called Lyme disease across the country.

Dr. Rudolph J. Scrimenti, a dermatologist in Milwaukee, reported the first case in the United States of the signature rash of early Lyme disease.

The patient had removed a tick from his skin three months earlier in north-central Wisconsin. Scrimenti treated the patient with penicillin based on medical literature he had read out of Europe.

“The patient became symptom-free within 48 hours,” he wrote in the journal article in 1970. “There has been no recurrence of symptoms for the past year.” However, Scrimenti said the cause of the disease was “uncertain.”

Scrimenti, who died in 2013, later began treating patients in Milwaukee and served on the review board of a journal on tick-borne diseases in the early 1990s.

Over the past three decades, Susan Paskewitz, a medical entomologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, has documented the growing prevalence of ticks in Wisconsin.

Paskewitz found that deer ticks, also called black-legged ticks, have moved steadily from northwest to southwest, and then into the central and eventually slowly into the eastern and southern Wisconsin.

“They invaded our state entirely,” Paskewitz said in a 2021 Wednesday Nite @ The Lab episode. She said the regeneration of forests decimated by logging in the early 1900s and rebounding of the deer population are the main drivers in Wisconsin. Paskewitz said warming temperatures caused by climate change are expected to lengthen the tick season and accelerate their northward march into Canada.

Confirmed cases of Lyme disease per 100,000 Wisconsin residents, 2020. (Wisconsin Department of Health Services)

Xia Lee, a tick biologist in Paskewitz’s lab, has studied the insects for more than a decade. Lee is soft-spoken, but when he talks about the parasites, he marvels at their “beauty.”

Lee explained that the Lyme-bearing ticks live between two and three years. They acquire blood meals from animal hosts at each stage of life — larva, nymph and adult.

“These guys are always born uninfected, and they have to pick up the infections when they feed on their first animal (hosts),” Lee said, pointing to the lab-raised larvae.

He said that larvae pick up pathogens during their first blood meal from infected small mammals, such as the white-footed mouse. They subsequently transmit those pathogens during their second meal as nymphs and their third meal as adults.

A Yale study has found that about 20% to 30% of the black-legged tick nymphs carry the bacterium that causes Lyme disease in southern New England, while the rate of infected adult ticks is 30% to 50%. The tick can also be infected with other microbes at the same time, carrying and transmitting other pathogens and making people sick with Lyme and other tick-borne diseases such as anaplasmosis and babesiosis.

Xia Lee, a postdoctoral vector biologist in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Entomology, is seen in the Susan Paskewitz Lab in Madison, Wis., on Sept. 21, 2021.  Lee hopes to develop a Lyme disease vaccine for mice, which spread the disease to ticks that feed on them and later infect humans.  (Coburn Dukehart/Wisconsin Watch)

Once an infected tick latches on a human, it falls off when full. If a tick is removed within 24 hours, the likelihood of transmission is very low, Lee said. However, when a poppy seed-sized nymphal tick firmly attaches itself to the skin, detecting and removing it is difficult, increasing the risk of infection.

Lee noted that Wisconsin never got the proper recognition as the site of the first case of the disease. That honor went to the town of Lyme in Connecticut, which remains one of the states with the highest incidence rates in the country.

“We like to joke about it and say that Wisconsin was actually the first state where Lyme disease was detected,” he said, “but we never got the glory for naming (it).”

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates. 

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Category:

Activism, Lyme, research, Ticks