Children are most prone to tick bites, because in childhood, the skin is thin enough and has an active circulation, which attracts blood-sucking insects. Most often, the tick is found on the head of a child under the age of 10 years, in children 10-14 years - more often on the chest, back and axillary region.
The danger for the child is the amount of the virus that has entered the children's body throughout the time of tick sucking. The tick can cause such serious diseases as:
- encephalitis;
- borreliosis (Lyme disease).
Therefore, it is necessary as soon as possible to begin to pull it out from the skin of the baby.
The child was bitten by a tick: what to do?
If the parents have found a bite of a tick on the body of the child, you should go to the trauma center.
If there is no possibility to go to the emergency department yourself, you can get an emergency telephone consultation on how to protect the child from ticks and provide him with first aid while biting.
How to remove a tick?
The procedure for extracting the tick from the child's body is as follows:
- It is necessary to remove the mite with clean hands. It will be better if parents use clean gloves to remove it. This will reduce the risk of inflammation.
- Using tweezers, it is necessary to grab the tick as close as possible to the proboscis.
- Then gently rotate the tweezers sideways around their axis. The tick must completely separate.
It is not recommended to pull out the tick, otherwise it may lead to incomplete removal, and the remaining fragments of the tick will continue to have a negative impact on the child. They are harder to pull out than the whole body.
If there are no tweezers at hand, the tick can be removed with a normal thread, wrapping it around the tick's body as close as possible to the proboscis. Then start shaking it and pulling it up. Perform any manipulation carefully and slowly to avoid rupture of the mite.
After the tick is removed from the body of the child, it is necessary to treat iodine or alcohol with a wound to avoid infection from the side. For oral administration give an antihistamine (fenistil, suprastin).
It is desirable to preserve the remains of the tick and carry it to PCR diagnostics to determine if the tick was encephalitic or does not pose a danger to the baby.
One and a half weeks after the bite, the child needs to take a blood test to detect the presence of the disease.
If a child has suffered from a tick bite, he needs a consultation of a child infectious disease specialist. In the case when the blood test confirmed the presence of borelli in the child, it is necessary to immediately start taking antibiotics that prevent the transfer of borreliosis into a chronic form (suprax, amoxiclav). The greatest effect of taking antibiotics will be if the treatment is started in the first ten days after the bite.
It is recommended to get vaccinated from encephalitis mite in advance. This will avoid serious complications in the future and without fear of going to rest at the cottage or in the forest, where the habitat of ticks is.