How do you get rid of ticks?

Oh, boy. If any of them were both attached and engorged, keep an eye out for the give-away bull’s eye rash. It appears only about 80% of the time that someone was exposed to Lyme Disease, ehrlichiosis, babiosis and Rocky-Mountain spotted fever.

He would be well-advised to get blood work done in several weeks for the specific titre.

Here’s the Center for Disease Control Main site with hyper links: http://www.cdc.gov/ticks/diseases/

Lyme also presents with severe aches in muscles and joints, fever, head-aches and fatigue.
So be vigilant.

These people say to use tweezers.

The CDC also says tweezers, and to wash clothes in hot water and dry on high heat. And they have a picture.

Removing the ticks properly, and deciding when and if you have contracted one of the diseases are two different issues.

If they have dug into the skin – light a match and let it heat up for a second, then blow it out. Press the matchhead on the tick, and it should back out of the skin so you can get rid of it. You don’t want to try to pull it out while the tick’s head is still in the skin.

@jeffgoldblumsprivatefacilities: I (and all the brochures that our local doctors hand out) would disagree with that. Using a fine tweezers specifically designed for the purpose will remove the embedded head and feelers.

@gailcalled really? I never knew they had tweezers designed just for that purpose. As long as they can remove the entire tick, they sound great!

@jeffgoldblumsprivatefacilities While that is the kind of thing I always heard, the site I was looking at suggested that stressed ticks will release toxins, increasing your chance of infection. No idea if that’s true. But if CDC says to use tweezers, that’s good enough for me.

Feed em Tocks

if they arnt stuck on vacume em and then empty the vacume into the toilet and flush…if they are attached use tick removing tweezer grab…turn clock wise and pull out..i work in a swamp and we get loads…many people say to kill them first but you run more risk of them putting toxins and lime disease into your body if they die (according to my work risk assessment)

When I was a kid my dad had a can of cold spray from the hospital that he sprayed on and the tick would let go. Still raises that more toxins from stressed ticks thing, and the tick was on my crotch. Yikes it was cold.

Cover the tick in Vaseline. This stops the tick from obtaining air and it will die and drop off. Pulling them off is not recommended as it can leave the sucker still in the skin which can go septic.

I used to remove them from my dog by covering the head of the tick in vaseline and then removing the tick with a tweezers.

When I lived in northern Florida, we would keep a garbage bag out on the front porch with rubbing alcohol in it. When we came back from the woods all clothing would go into that bag to await washing in very hot water, and we would go straight to the shower.

Sometimes we would follow that with close inspection of each other’s bodies, with a pleasant outcome typically.