You shouldn't salt a leech that's sucking your blood (2019) | Hacker News Reader

You shouldn't salt a leech that's sucking your blood (2019)

cbc.ca

89 pointspabs370 comments

I had 20 leeches in the bottoms of both feet when I was a kid. They were borrowed in there...there was no removing them manually. Fortunately my quick-thinking parent had spray mosquito repellant - sprayed the bottom of my feet and the leeches all let go and crawled out in about 15 seconds. So use spray mosquito repellant is my personal recommendation.

*burrowed

You don't know that.

Maybe they took the adage literally, and tried to walk in his shoes.

Are you sure they were leeches?

A quick (horrified) web search suggests that there are no leech species that burrow into flesh.

Wow, if only you had been there to see it. Yes, they BURROWED. Yes, it was horrifying. They were fat and full of blood as they dripped off my feet. I have a quite accurate visual memory of certain past events. I still remember my mother's face, she was terrified, but also quick thinking, and I didn't feel a thing. I have a healthy respect for leeches, but strangely, the incident left me feeling quite invincible. My feet were fine the next day.

I've dealt with ordinary fresh water leeches, and hope never to again.

I don't know if I'd approach within 30 feet of water after your experience! :)

IIRC, all chemical removal methods (including DEET/mosquito repellant) have the same potential downsides as salting; they increase the risk of the leech vomiting back into the wound and causing an infection.

Even good old alcohol?

They get drunk and go after your wife.

The one time I had leeches they just popped off on their own. They were huge so they were probably full. My white T shirt had turned into a red one... Because of the anticoagulant.

Not a fan of them but where I live now they don't exist

It's the same with Ticks! People will say to burn them off but if you do that they will throw up and increase the likelihood of disease transmission. You want to pull them off in one clean pull.

Slowly, attempting to not pop off the head before it is removed from your body.

Really hard to get the suckers (literally) off using regular tweezers without squeezing them into regurgitation and death. They sell special tick removal tools that look like a tiny two-prong fork which grabs them from the … face I guess… and allows removing them cleanly.

I’ve used those and they are a bit fiddly. The best tool I’ve found are the needle pointed angled precision tweezers (like they mostly sell for electronics work).

If you live in an area with ticks, getting tick tweezers is a must. The ones we have have the fork you mention on one end, but what is much better is it has tweezers on the other end that have a hockey stick like curve at the bottom and come to a very small point. Very easy to grab a small tick and pull it off.

You're also supposed to save the tick to make diagnosis of tick-borne illness easier. Years ago I had what felt like a four-day hangover after getting bit so I went to the doctor; he gave me Doxy and sent my blood off to the lab which later confirmed that I had Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Supposedly it's easier/more conclusive to test the tick itself for pathogens than your blood.

Pantyhose is another thing to consider. It's pretty much the perfect anti-tick measure. It's not too hot and the ticks can't make their way through it. I know a few farmers who use it when going out into the bushes, they never get ticks.

There's also a tiny lasso tool that you can loop around it and tighten, making throwing up impossible.

In Australia the current medical advice for ticks is [1]:

"For ticks that can be seen (adult ticks), freeze the tick to kill it where it is"

"For ticks that can hardly be seen – use permethrin cream to kill the tick where it is"

You can buy tick freezing spray, which is used in a similar way to wart freezing spray.

[1] https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/2022-11/manage...

Edit: Here is the research on which the medical advice is based. Dated 2019 by Australian researchers, so the updated practise might not be widely deployed outside Australia.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6494660/

Edit: A comprehensive resource on tick treatment, including justification for the freezing advice.

https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-01/preven...

Edit: and finally, the ABC Catalyst video segment demonstrating the technique.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j77nrTVM_j8

This is good advice. You can buy “wart-off” freezing spray over the counter at a pharmacy to do this.

Gotta be honest… the phrase “ticks that can barely be seen” did nothing to improve my outlook on life

I've never felt keener to limit my explorations to the great indoors

Ah, a fellow indoorsman. :)

I don't buy the alternatives at all.

> Instead, he recommends using a fingernail or a credit card to break the seal between the leech's mouth and your skin quickly

Far easier said than done. If it were that easy why even go for the salt?

> Another option is to wait until the leech is done feeding so it will fall off on its own

I'm just gonna wait 30+ minutes with a leech on me? no thanks

Yeah, no. “Also consider just letting the spider lay eggs in your ear and then it will move along on its own.” Uh, that’s not gonna happen.

The difference with spiders laying eggs in your ear, is that leeches sucking on your body is a regognized medical treatment for various things.

They don't lay eggs, they don't infest you. They just suck blood and are gone.

But just nitpicking on your example. I had leeches involuntarily on me for real where I just ripped them off and I don't think I would ever considering letting them suck till they are full.

Makes you wonder what we have been missing out on in terms of spider-based treatments...

It's a canonical spider-and-egg problem.

A colonoscopy is a legitimate, useful medical procedure, but I don’t want one of those to sneak up on me either.

I think I could tolerate a medical leech if required. I wouldn’t love it, but you gotta do what you’ve gotta do. I would be less tolerant of one randomly taking a meal from my leg.

They just suck blood, while comingling their gut bacteria with your bloodstream.

Bit of a difference.

Real things people said on 911 calls:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPSEw8XnjH8

I dunno, I think I'd rather dribble in some hydrogen peroxide to sterilize and remove the eggs, as opposed to getting a spider bite on the inside of my ear canal.

Now that I think about it, I have no idea what hydrogen peroxide does to spiderweb material. It seems like the kind of thing one might learn during a childhood phase of mostly-unthinking cruelty to animals.

So are you suggesting that you would pour salt on it?

If you would rather follow your gut because the expert's recommendation sounds "too easy, then picture a similar scenario in your own area of expertise where you give friendly advise to a random person and they react like that to your advice.

If the article has a video or something showing how to "using a fingernail or a credit card to break the seal" I'd be so much more convinced.

I can't even imagine how to do that correctly when I'm sitting in an air-conditioned room so the chance I'll able to "break the seal" in the wild as the expert suggests is around zero. Especially the article says one has to do it "quickly" so it doesn't have time to vomit blood back into me.

It's really not that difficult. You scrape them off you with the edge of the card, where they attach to you

Unless I misread, GP thinks the advice is too hard, not "too easy". Which yes, if I told someone playing games on linux is easy you just need to use `winetricks` to install the correct version of X, Y, Z, then modify library overrides, I would entirely expect a layperson to say "easier said than done".

"too easy" was a quotation taken directly from their comment. I replied to that.

As someone who’s had leeches on me, North Eastern America, and never even heard of salting them I’ve always just treated them like a bandaid and ripped them off quickly. The hardest part really is grabbing them since they are slippery. I assume there’s nastier leeches out there though where that might be a bad idea.

I would always put the area with the leech back into the water and then use a sharp edged rock to scrape them off. They seemed a little bit more willing to leave my skin doing it that way.

Tweezers or tongs in a first aid kit are pretty useful for that and for removing ticks.

Is there anything tongs can’t do?

Leeches will pop off easily. There's a nastier cousin of leeches (lampreys) that I think you'll rip a small chunk of flesh out if you'd yank them off forcefully.

I'd like to emphasize that they are metaphorical cousins only, being segmented-worms and jawless-fish respectively. :p

P.S.: "Would you rather fight one lamprey-sized leech, or 400 leech-sized lampreys?"

> Far easier said than done. If it were that easy why even go for the salt?

I think it's more gross to pluck it out. Hence why people just pour salt on it or let it finish feeding maybe? Leeches can be really viscerally repulsive to look at and touch

In my experience, the reason people don't scrape them off is the rumour that they leave their mouthparts behind.

Removing the terrestrial leeches that live near me in Australia is easy. Put the edge of a credit card a few cm away, resting against your skin at a slight angle, and then quickly scrape the leech away like you're scraping paint.

You make it sound like a bad thing

This headline sounds like a euphemism for something or one of those folksy sounding bits of wisdom

Same here, I thought it was going to be an analogy for a political story.

Now that I know it is literal leeches and that the options are scraping them off or waiting for them to finish, avoiding areas with leeches feels like the move.

I used to burn off ticks with a lighter (revenge!) until I learned the same thing was true for them.

The risk of getting a disease is apparently higher if you handle them that way, essentially making it their revenge.

Why not both? My tactic is to pull them off cleanly as possible then torch em.

Excellent advice!

The Tick Key, www.tickkey.com, does the job quite well. You put it over the tick and slide the narrow slot from behind until the mouthparts are in as far as they can fit.

You may be surprised at how hard the tick holds on, but work slowly until it pops off, preferably into a container that you can put in the freezer.

Etick.ca can be used to identify and report the tick.

My cat has brought in three ticks this spring and summer that I found crawling about while he was on my lap. Cats grooming themselves seem to prevent ticks from embedding.

Doctors can prescribe doxycycline as a precaution.

At least in Australia, removing a tick by force is not recommended. This is because it has a chance of the tick vomiting pathogens into your blood. Which is particularly bad in regions where ticks carry bad diseases (like the paralysis tick in Australia). The recommendation is instead to use a freeze spray which immediately immobilises the tick.

> the paralysis tick

I knew about Lyme and the meat-allergy inducing ticks, but not this one. Yikes.

Meta: Refreshing to see the actual advice in headline and the reasoning in first paragraph of the article. Not somewhere buried three pages down.

Meta?

Meta to the data.

I was once hiking in the dark in the south of Japan. I crossed a few streams but didn't think much of it. A while later, I felt like my socks were sticking to my shoes and unusually warm. I looked down to see my ankles and shoes covered in blood. Totally drenched in dark red blood with 10 leeches attached. This was truly the most confused and terrified I ever felt in my life - seeing that much blood without feeling any pain was utterly disorienting.

What’s with the cliffhanger? :)

How did you get them off?

I scraped and plucked them off, not the safest way to get rid of them apparently...

Isn't that exactly what the article said you should do?

Can a layman (to medicine) avoid leaving teeth in the wound?

He didn't. They're still there.

Nice positive article about leeches, includes bonus pitch for maggots

https://nymag.com/vindicated/2016/11/how-leeches-made-their-...

Poured snuff into the top of ankle length hiking boots, never had a problem with leeches.

Interesting and very old school.

Nicotine is an insecticide so I can see it repelling leeches.

I came here looking for Rule 34

4chan is that way...

i regret clicking this,

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