Tick Removers: yes, EW – but you may thank us for this

The sun’s shining, everyone’s packing up their manual phone-chargers, dongles, tent-lights and envisaging holidays filled with sun, grass, music and summer gadgets.

But – sorry to lower the tone – have you remembered your tick remover? And yes by ticks we mean those ugly little creatures that bite you. And by tick remover we mean a cunning device that extracts the afore-mentioned tick from your poor skin without it regurgitating its stomach into you.

More after the jump…

Maybe you don’t want to think about tick removal right now, but we’re just saying *dark glances* that you will want to think about tick removal when there’s one burrowed in your arm kicking its little legs around.

Seriously, tick bites are on the increase in Britain and are quite common in mainland Europe and the States. They carry serious diseases like Lyme’s disease.

Though people don’t always notice they have been bitten, once you do, it’s advisable to take the tick off asap. As lymediseaseaction.org.uk states: “it makes sense that the longer a tick is attached, the more chance you have of being infected by any disease that it carries.”

There are various methods of removal, but lymediseaseaction.org.uk urges you not to squeeze or twist the body of the tick, as this may cause the head and body to separate, leaving the head embedded in your skin.

No – this is where tick removers come in – go for the lasso action on this useful device instead. It pulls it from right next to skin and extracts the whole creature, without encouraging it to regurgitate.

Once removed the British Health Proection Agency www.hpa.org.uk would grateful if you could put it in a container labelled with the date and location and send it to them for analysis.

Official NHS info on tick bites

Buy a tick remover price varies according to distributor.

[via boingboing]

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