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Comment by thinkingtoilet | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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

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