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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

How do you kill them?

Since you can’t know if they’re there or not, you won’t know if anything kills them or not. So, no matter what you do you’ll imagine them having sex on your face all night and engorging themselves on your skin oils then pooping on you. These are things that can’t be unthought. Sorry man.

Does this mean that if you are doing things in the dark (eg driving at night) then the mites will come out and do their thing while you are awake?

One compound is terpinen-4-ol which is a primary constituent of tea tree oil. Several products containing terpinen-4-ol exist to treat rosacea and ocular rosacea such as Cliradex and Oust Demodex.

Study of commercial terpinen-4-ol products against mites:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30120003/

They're probably mostly harmless or there won't be 8 billion humans on the planet.

This is the kind of perspective that actually works for me. Thanks!

Even parasites that are definitely detrimental are generally not especially bad for hosts that have coevolved with them. Hookworm in the American South was completely debilitating for the impoverished whites it infected, but basically a nuisance for the blacks. This is generally how parasites work.

So there would be much more cause for alarm if you believed that your face mites were a variety you weren't already adapted to.

> Hookworm in the American South was completely debilitating for the impoverished whites it infected, but basically a nuisance for the blacks.

That is fascinating (is hookworm from Africa and not present in Europe?). Where did you read/learn about this?

> is hookworm from Africa and not present in Europe?

Correct. (Well, the other hookworm, A. duodenale, is present around the Mediterranean. Necator Americanus, "the American killer", is from Africa.)

I read about it on a blog, but it looks like there's some good discussion of the history in https://www.amazon.com/Parasites-Tales-Humanitys-Unwelcome-G...

One of the things I find most interesting about the whole N. Americanus affair is that hookworm was a public health disaster of colossal proportions, and the medical research that recognized it was a big, important advance... but medical treatment for the problem is mostly irrelevant. The (very successful) "medical" intervention that solved this problem was just convincing people to wear shoes.

That's not saying much - just means that we can live until we can breed, and that the next generation also makes it somehow. The same thing could be said about any illness, drug, disaster or mis-treatment that ever happened.

Ivermectin cream. They are believed to cause rosacea, but are typically harmless if not beneficial.

>Ivermectin cream.

For a moment I thought it was a joke. Such are the times.

Definitely not a joke. I use Ivermectin cream to control Rosacea and it works well. The goal isn’t to eliminate them but to prevent overgrowth which is likely what causes most Rosacea.

Ivermectin is an amazing drug all around. Very safe and useful in so many circumstances. It’s a great shame that it got politicized, first by people who took it unnecessarily because they didn’t trust the establishment, and then by the media and politicians, who badmouthed Ivermectin in order to dunk on the first group. Very sad.

Is there any risk of ivermectin resistance developing in nematodes? That would be catastrophic, right?

This has been used for rosacea for a long time, predating the pandemic. there's a prescription called soolantra

Probably ivermectin or lime sulfur or lindane or similar broad-spectrum pesticides will work, but they'll always come back.

PLEASE DO NOT PUT LINDANE ON YOUR FACE TO GET RID OF PENIS MITES.

Why do you want to kill them?

fire

may be instead they can be trained/convinced to perform some useful function, kind of like nanobots.

A mitepunk future, huh...

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