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Ticks: hard ticks, soft ticks, seed ticks of immature forms. Although everybody says they have a seed tick on them. The hard ticks, what they do is they quest and when they climb up a blade of grass and wait for somebody to walk by. And so they may travel even 30 feet to find their host, so when you are walking through the woods, the CO2 you are giving off is what the ticks read and that’s why they home in on you. They crawl in your clothing. They can attach anywhere and the bite is painless. Like everybody knows, usually you find it later on when it is engorged with blood and you notice it on you. It takes 24 hours of feeding really to transfer disease. So it’s really mandatory when you have been out in the woods, when you have been on a camp-out, to do the tick check. And look all over for ticks. You shouldn’t do it three days later or not. You should do it within 24 hours so you can spot the tick and get it off before it’s been feeding for 24 hours. The best way, at least by two studies, is to remove it by grasping the tick as close to the skin.
I think everybody knows what a tick looks like. Characteristic appearance. The important thing really is to check everywhere. Here it is under the hair. If you didn’t look under the hair and this finger is pushed out the hair, you wouldn’t find the tick until who knows. The next time you went to the barber shop. So anyway, it’s important to look over every part of your body. The things that they commonly transmit is; one is Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, petechia purpura beginning in the wrists and the ankles and it spreads in. I think everybody says the same thing. If you think about Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, treat it. Tetracycline is easy enough. We see it over and over, a child in the ICU that’s been sent home from the Children’s Hospital Emergency Room five times and finally someone thought about Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Usually because they are so sick then. So again, it’s one of those things. If you think about Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, treat it.
Lyme disease is erythema chronicum migrans. We get a ton of people coming in saying, "I got bit by a tick and I got something on my skin and I think it’s Lyme disease." But there is a specific appearance to that lesion. Then iliychiosis, which is becoming more and more widely reported, particularly in the Southeast, the so-called Rocky Mountain Spotless fever. You have all this sequelae, the low platelets, thrombocytopenia, the headache the fever, but you don’t have the skin disease to tip you off the Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. This is erythema chronicum migrans with Lyme disease. What it is, is a spreading red ring and they do look like that. And all the various things that people come in with.