My mother-in-law keeps warning me about “kleszcze” falling out of trees when we’re in the garden and yesterday I saw an ad on the telly about vaccinations from “kleszcze” illnesses so I finally decided to look up what this terribly scary “kleszcz” thing is in the dictionary. To my disappointment it isn’t some kind of bat like predator with big teeth, it’s just a tick.
So then I started to wonder what the paranoia is about ticks as I have never heard about them being a problem in the UK. Well apparently the problem is due to Tick-borne Encephalitis which is a nasty viral illness that affects the central nervous system and has a fatality rate of 1 – 5%. It’s not found in the UK or in western europe so much – it’s more commonly found in the forested areas of Russia and central europe. See the map below taken from kleszczeinfo.pl for coverage.
The general advice (taken from klesczeinfo.pl) is to be careful when walking in forested areas, fields or parks and to check your body regularly to make sure there aren’t any tick bites. Children should be checked 2 or 3 times a day. Check your clothes when you get home and have a shower to remove any larvae that are hard to see but might have stuck to you. Particularly pay attention to soft areas such as behind the knees, behind the ears etc.
If you discover a tick then it should be removed from as close to the skin as possible as soon as possible using a fine pair of tweezers. Don’t try and kill it using oils or creams or burn it with matches or cigarrettes as the virus is in the tick’s saliva and doing any of these things might increase the amount of infective material transmitted into the victim’s body.
For the paranoid there are vaccinations available (and no surprise it’s a vaccine manufacturer sponsoring the kleszczeinfo.pl website and running the ad campaign on TV about it).
Oh, and apparently they don’t fall from trees (will look forward to setting my mother-in-law right about that one) as they live in grass/bushes no higher than 20 to 70 centimetres where they find it easiest to latch on to passing prey.
