Everyone knows that a tick is a dangerous spider-like companion that can attach to the skin and infect an animal or person with a serious disease that leads to the development of the virus in the body.
Due to the fact that it has small dimensions, it is difficult to notice it, and this shows the insidiousness of a tick injury: when a person discovers a focus on the skin, the disease is already beginning to develop.
Than the tick is dangerous?
First of all, a danger to humans and animals (some species of birds, cattle, rodents, cats and dogs, monkeys) is represented by an ixovid tick. Its individuals are carriers of infection - encephalitis, which affects the central nervous system. The attack of a tick is especially affected by those who often stay in the forest:
- hunters;
- forest rangers;
- surveyors;
- tourists.
In the latitudes where the tick is common, measures are being taken every year to inform the public about how to avoid contact with the tick and what to do if it infects a person. However, these measures do not prevent cases of infection with tick-borne encephalitis , and thousands of people seek help from physicians with characteristic complaints.
If a person is bitten by an infected tick, then he begins fever because the virus has penetrated the spinal cord and brain and caused their inflammation.
Symptoms after a tick bite
Before you treat a tick bite and encephalitis, you need to determine the symptoms: how much the virus has hit the body.
- Encephalitis is characterized by acute manifestation. Obvious symptoms occur several weeks after the bite.
- Due to the fact that the virus acts on the spinal cord and brain, motor neurons are affected,
and this is manifested by convulsions, a violation of the sensitivity of the skin, paralysis of some muscles, and in some cases, of their whole group, and this leads to numbness of the extremities. - When a virus hits the brain, a person has severe headaches and vomiting. In the absence of help, he may lose consciousness or fall into a coma. Depending on the area of the lesion, the virus can cause psychoemotional agitation, lack of orientation in time and space.
- Then, myocarditis, arrhythmia, and heart failure may develop.
- Symptoms can also appear in the digestive tract, in the form of stool retention and changes in liver size.
- All these symptoms appear against the background of high temperature - at 40 ° C. This is due to high toxicity in the body.
- Encephalitis can cause paralysis and lead to death. According to extras, about 2% of patients die from this disease. A much higher percentage of deaths in cases where the virus belongs to the Far Eastern rather than the European type.
Than to process a place of a bite of the tick or mite?
Before you cure the tick's bite, it must be pulled: take tweezers, drip oil or alcohol to the site of the lesion, and after 15 minutes try to pull it out. Instead of tweezers, you can use a thread: make a loop and tighten the mite, and then swing the movements out of the skin.
It is not necessary to throw out the tick: it is necessary to put it in a jar and take it to the hospital to find out if it is infected or not.
If the tick is quickly detected, then there is a high probability of avoiding infection. After pulling the mite, the wound is treated with iodine and hydrogen peroxide.
How to be treated for a tick bite?
Treatment after a tick bite is prescribed if symptoms occur. The infectiologist should be informed in any case that there was a bite, and within a month to observe the patient and his state of health.
Antibiotics at tick bite are ineffective, this is due to the fact that the virus is not a bacterium, and therefore, when encephalitis is prescribed anti-malignant immunoglobulin. This is quite an expensive medicine, because it is made on the basis of blood donors who are immune to this virus.
Also for prophylactic purposes the patient is prescribed immunostimulants - antiviral drugs that activate immunity. These are medications based on interferon and ribonuclease (for example, anaferon).
With the bite of encephalitic mites, treatment is also manifested in the intake of vitamins, a nutritious diet and a bed rest.