Another method of removing ticks that also helps sterilize the bite area: Cover the tick for about 30 sec. with a small cup filled with rubbing alcohol. (The cap of the alcohol bottle works fine.) The tick becomes drunk and incapable, and lets go enough that tweezers can pick it off without damage. Vodka works too.
Site is: Are you supposed to twist ticks counter-clockwise to remove them?
Please, if the person starting a new topic would cite a link to the relevant Mailbag Answer, it would help keep us all on the same page.
This topic, of course, I would have name “Tick Talk”…
I use nail polish remover to make a tick let go. But other than that I can personally attest to the validitiy of checking yourself and family for these parasites whenever the season comes around. When my son was 3 he had spent the weekend at his father’s who had a heavily wooded lot. I bathed him on Sunday and didn’t really check him good. On monday when I bathed him I found a small tick embedded on the back of his neck just inside the hairline. By friday he was running a temp of 104. Saturday he was vomiting. Sunday he woke up with a rash. After a nightmarish week of doctor visits and a fever that would not drop below 102 even with motrin we landed in the emergency room. Where he was diagnosed with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. He was hospitalized in the children’s ICU for two nights where he was given large doses of a tetracycline antibiotic and a unit of platelettes. We then spent 4 more days in a regular room. After reading up on this disease I realized that he was diagnosed just in time. (No thanks to his pediatricians who thought he had some other viral infection with a rash.) People who perish from this disease do so because they do not recieve treatment in time, they miss the window of opportunity.
It is my understanding that had I found the tick in time it may not have stayed attached long enough to transmit the blood borne parasite that does so much damage. Now during the Spring and Summer I am almost fanatical about checking us all for ticks.
Needs2know