Hacker News Reader

Comment by huytersd | Hacker News Reader

Just go to your PCP and get your one time course of 2 doxycycline pills as soon as you get bitten.

I also spray my hiking/yardwork pants and boots with permethrin. DEET is pretty useless, I’ve seen them walk right over DEET sprayed boots onto my pants. They make it about 5 steps through permethrin. I’m surprised advise from Harvard is getting this wrong.

If you want even more protection, you can buy stocking like slacks and a shirt specifically made for this purpose on Amazon. I wear these when I’m weeding or clearing brush.

All the above methods haven’t failed me in 5 years.

View on HN

Taking antibiotics after every random bite is overkill. Antibiotics overuse is a serious issue for your body and for the general antibiotics resistance as well.

When the tick is attached less than 24 hours it won't transmit Lyme disease according to the CDC. I check myself every evening after outdoor activities, remove 10-20 ticks every year and knock-knock never had Lyme disease yet.

I wasn't aware of the permethrin effectiveness though. Thanks for letting us know.

If you take precautions, you might get bitten once a season. Taking antibiotics once or twice a year isn’t all that insane.

Why not just use permethrin or anti tick clothing if you’re regularly pulling off 10-20 ticks. It’s disgusting and you can get some other serious diseases besides Lyme like Rocky mountain fever, alpha gal or encephalitis that are harder to treat or have no cures.

I’ve always heard the 24-36 hour thing is a statistical probability figure. You most probably won’t but you could get it as soon as the tick attaches as well. Also if you squeeze the body of an engorged tick as you’re pulling it out, you force all the contents of its stomach (where the Lyme bacteria lives), into your bloodstream. Always use tweezers and go for the head.

10-20 ticks every year??? I can’t imagine that and I often run in grassy fields (not tall grass) and at most I found 1-2 ticks on me or my kids.

How do you get that kind of numbers in the first place?

I think that is just what happens if you live in tick-dense areas and do a lot if outdoor activities. I take every precaution, and remove approximatively the same number of ticks per season. Some places are just like that. Once, I rested with my right hand against the ground, just a couple of seconds, and upon lifting it up I noticed around 30 ticks crawling on it.

This is disturbing what state? Where do you find the ticks hiding on your body?

Why would you not believe it? It's normal where I live too. I definitely get dozens of bites every year and have been formally diagnosed with and treated for Lyme twice because it's pretty easy to miss one. Tick bites are very often completely painless and they often choose very discreet locations for their meal.

Keep in mind tick season is March to June and September to December (although it started in February this year because of unusual weather). That's a lot of days with "1-2 ticks" and it adds up.

I’ve never had a tick bite I could miss. They form a blister and itch like crazy for a couple of days. I wonder if the inflammatory response goes away if you get bitten too often. I know it happens with mosquitos if you get bitten too often.

I get a strong reaction after I remove the tick (like a little necrotic volcano that itches like mad and takes about 18 months for the blemish to disappear completely). While the tick is there, I usually feel only nothing and find them by inspection. Tick checks are your best defence.

Absolutely normal in areas where they are common. You learn to pick them quickly after a while.

If you have animals such as dogs and cats it's much more than that.

DEET is a repellent which is meant to keep them away, but if they land then they land. Permethrin is a pesticide so it kills. When I'm in the woods I wear outdoor clothing that's been sprayed with permethrin, but I also put a "heavy-duty" DEET repellent on my clothes and use OLE (oil of lemon and eucalyptus) on exposed skin, even though the last one might just be placebo.

After every bite? That is a manual how to breed multi resistant Borrelia burgdorferi, the short version.

Please be a responsible human being and consult a doctor. Common symptoms for a bacterial infections are flu like symptoms and a bullseye-like rash a few days after the bite. Be on the lookout for those and you will be fine.

Getting antibiotics maybe once a year is not excessive. Please stop being hyperbolic, I’m well aware of MRSAs and do my best to take them sparingly. Where I live between 50-70% of the deer ticks have Lyme disease so it’s not overkill.

This was in reference to after every bite, not once a year.

Antibiotic resistance is not hyperbole. It is a real problem, and potentially a big one. What would be hyperbolic is if the part of the world that lives in tick infested regions would be pretty much on a constant antibiotic binge during season.

A full dose is two weeks and you are likely to be bitten again. I don't know if the suggestion was in reference to ideas that float around the Internet that you shouldn't take the full two week dose, but none of those studies have been replicated. Given what we know from how antibiotic resistance forms, they could be potentially harmful.

Just be careful when taking medical advice.

Antibiotic resistance almost never occurs in isolated situations. It’s hospital settings and large factory farms that are the issue. Either ways there’s a Lyme vaccine on the way. It should be available by 2025.

By far the weirdest thing to me in this entire thread, as someone who had long-term Lyme disease, is the dudes bragging about how often they remove ticks from themselves and their children, yet who are more scared of antibiotic resistance the Lyme.

Simply does not compute. Do you, like, get off on risking contracting infectious disease? I feel bad for your children.

That's perhaps the weirdest insult attempt in a long time.

Perhaps not removing the tiny spider like creatures that suck your blood could be something to brag about in some overly macho context. But removing them? Of course I remove them, from myself, children, pets, and anyone else. Ticks are a fact of life, and you will get bitten if you live in their areas.

A vaccine can not some soon enough. In the meantime, Lyme can be cured by antibiotics. Staying put indoors or constantly being on antibiotics during summer is not an option.

If I contacted my practitioner and wanted prophylactic wide spectrum antibiotics I'd be kindly shown the door. That is a controlled substance for a reason. That reason is antibiotic resistance, a well studied scientific fact, and not something where our own opinions matter much.

Sorry for the akshually energy, but the acronym MRSA is specifically for methicillin-resistant Staph aureus. In this context you might have meant MDR for multi-drug resistant? There's also XDR for the apocalyptic superbugs we're inadvertently breeding.

Yeah I didn’t know the difference. Multi drug resistant anything is what I meant.

Unfortunately, these 'common symptoms' often do not occur after an infection, so this is misleading. In never had them but was positive for Lyme after dealing with joint pain for quite a while. Taking a single dose of Doxy is usually recommended if you live in an area with high prevalence of Lyme in ticks [1], and if the tick was not cleanly removed within 24h. The latest meta study I'm aware of showed that this will reduce the likelihood of infection by about 70% [2].

The fear of breeding a MR Borrelia is completely overblown. By far the highest risk of breeding MRSA are in a hospital setting, not by taking a single dose of Doxy at home. The main reason to not take Doxy is its side effects (for instance, when I had to take it against my Lyme infection, I vomited like there's no tomorrow, which fortunately is one of the lesser serious side effects. Had to switch to Amoxi.).

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/datasurveillance/lyme-disease-maps....

[2] https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s128...

Ah faithful doxycycline, a legitimate cureall. Well tolerated, cheap, with few side effects when used sparingly.

Just watch out for the vomiting.

For me it's diarrhea. But yeah...Is the vomiting mostly with babies? Or even adults?

You can get into your PCP in less than a week?

Yes but I’ve also used one of the plethora of telehealth systems before that will let you speak to a doctor within a hour and you can pick up your prescription in two.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com