by Rod_outbak » 04 Apr 2018, 12:23 pm
Dealing with ticks:-
A recent visitor discovered he had returned home with a whole crop of tiny seed ticks attached(crawling around in the dirt at one stage). By the time he had realised what the itch was about, he had scratched the area a few times, and it was beginning to look like a war zone…
His wife is a pharmacists assistant, and suggested using the cream they use for the treatment for Scabies.
Scabies is a TINY burrowing parasitic mite, which can end up infesting most of your skin, if left untreated.
Well, it turns out the Scabies mites are closely related to ticks…
Reccommendation is to use a cream containing PERMETHRIN, such as "Lyclear Scabies Cream". The instructions(for Scabies) detail covering your whole body with the stuff, but for treating ticks, you just apply it to the tick bite.
Reports are the ticks were all dead and dropping off(complete with head) inside 10 minutes, and the cream even halts the maddening itch of the bites where you scratched the tick off, and the head remains.
The cream received the BIG thumbs-up from my visitor.
A tube of the Lyclear Scabies Cream is around $15 from your chemist, and doesn’t require a doctors script.
Just be warned; there is another treatment option for Scabies, which I believe is a lotion, with Ivermectin in it.
Ivermectin is used as an external parasitic treatment on cattle, and while I'm sure it works just as well on humans, I read that a lot of people suffer reactions to the Ivermectin-based lotion.
(Mind you; that is when treating Scabies over large areas of skin, so maybe not as obvious when treating individual ticks).
Plan C, is if you own cattle, go backline yourself with a shot of Paramax, and ride it out…
And now, I have to go and scratch like crazy, because talking about ticks just makes me start itching…
Flies:-
If you were walking around here at present (Western QLD), you'd be squirting insect repellent directly into your eyes, in the futile hope that you might stop the black flies from annoying the phuk out of you.. I noticed that they are much more intense in the trees along the creeks at present.
I had 3 different brands of tropical strength repellent on the other day, and the bloody flies were still crawling into my eyes.
Might be worth having a fly-veil tucked away somewhere (Not really knowing if flies are a problem in your part of the world...).
Water:
I'd also suggest water purifier tablets. Rainwater tanks can easily have something in them that gives you a guts-ache for days, so I'd be treating any water I used along the way.
A few spare plastic garbage bags are extremely handy. A small roll of them weighs next to nothing, they can be used as padding to make a pack quiet, and there are million things you can use them for in an emergency.
My 2 cents.
Cheers,
Rod.
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Sharing the extreme love with cats in Outback QLD