Tick Season In Maine Arrives Early – How To Remove A Tick

Thanks to a warm winter, folks and animals in Maine are encountering blood sucking ticks about a month earlier than normal. A tick may or may not be a carrier of a horrible disease such as Lyme. So how do you remove a tick?  Glad you asked.

First off, the best thing to do is to prevent a tick from latching onto you. According to WebMD, here's how:

1. Avoid areas where ticks hang out, like old piles of leaves, rotten wood piles, tall grassy areas, piles of brush, under railroad ties and around stone walls.  Maybe you can even remove these tick sources from your yard.
2. Cover up your body while working in areas like these.  Wear long pants and tuck the ends into your socks.  Long sleeve shirts and hats are good too, and leave the sandals in the house!  Ticks are most visible when crawling on light/bright colored clothing.
3. Spray or rub yourself down with an insect repellent.
4. When you're done working in the yard, throw your clothes into the dryer for a least fifteen minutes, or hang them up in the hot sun.  Heat kills ticks.
5. Check your all over your body and comb your hair out!  This can be a good time to ask the help of a friend.  Do the same with your kids and pets, this is especially important, because kids and dogs aren't thinking too heavily about ticks.

So how does one remove a tick?

1. Grab a set of tweezers.
2. Then grab the tick as close to it's mouth as you can.  It's mouth will be buried into your skin, and it's body will be above skin level. Try your best not to grab it's body.  By squeezing a tick's body, you could inject infected fluid into yourself!
3. Pull the tick straight out, and be extremely gentle, because you do not want to break it's body and leave it's head in your skin. Do not twist it!
4. Wash the area where the tick was embedded thoroughly.
5. Throw the little blood sucker into a baggy and save it for the medical people if you ever develop symptoms. If you develop headaches, a rash, joint pain or flu - like symptoms, then see a doctor.

Wondering what sort of tick that you just pulled out of your child?  The University of Maine has a Tick Lab and can help you out with that. It's a free service.