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Posted by anupcs on May 24th 2006 in Health & Fitness, Nature, Outdoors
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The above photograph shows a tick bite I suffered recently while hiking in the rugged Ventana Wilderness near Big Sur. The offending arachnid feasted on me overnight while I slept. The previous day, I had hiked a trail that wasn’t well maintained and I had to often go past shrubs and trees strewn across the trail. The tick must have latched on to me somewhere along this trail. I woke up to a stinging and itching feeling on my stomach. It didn’t take long to identify the culprit and I had the wife pluck it out. She did it so fast and with such force that the tick was lost to science for ever. The advice is to preserve the tick to identify whether it’s a vector of diseases such as Lyme disease.

Lyme disease is a tick-borne disease caused by a corkscrew-shaped bacterium called Borrelia burgdorferi. This is only spread by the bite of an infected tick and never from person to person. The two species of ticks capable of carrying this pathogen are the deer tick found mostly in the Northeast and the upper Midwest, and the closely related Western black-legged tick in northern California and Oregon. Usually, the tick has to be inside you (meaning the head is inside with the body sticking out) for at least 36-48 hours before the bacteria can pass on to your body. If identified early, the disease is curable and a single dose of the antibiotic doxycycline can reduce your risk to almost nil. If left untreated, the results could be devastating.

The first symptom of Lyme disease is a big rash which expands outwards from the tick bite in a bull’s eye pattern. It takes anywhere from 2-3 weeks after the bite for this symptom to arise. If not treated at this point, it can develop into less pleasant conditions such as facial paralysis, heart palpitations, joint pain, fatigue, fever, etc. Antibiotics can still cure it but it could take months.

The tick is in its nymph stage (it goes through three stages during its life) when it transmits Lyme disease. Because of this, it’s often difficult to spot and not everybody will feel the itching or stinging that I felt. To remove a tick, the current wisdom suggests using tweezers to grasp it tightly near the skin and pull it with one quick and steady motion. The wife used her fingers. Sometimes the head of the tick is left in your body. While this feels weird, it’s O.K. because the tick cannot transmit the disease once the body is gone.

Besides Lyme disease, ticks carry other diseases such as the fabulously named Babesiosis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and the Human granulocytic ehrlichiosis (HGE).

While hiking in California, I often worry about possible black bear or mountain lion encounters but ticks are rarely a concern. This has changed with a single incident. Though I am not going to go to the extreme of tucking my hiking pants into my socks and sealing off the pant-sock junction with duct tape (as some people suggest), I plan on searching my body thoroughly after each and every hike.