Promoting a Safer Summer
for you and your family.

Summer is the best time for family fun, good times with neighbors, and outdoor activities. It also provides a good environment for ticks and mosquitoes, which can carry diseases harmful to humans.

A few simple precautions and actions can help you and your family prevent and lessen the burden of bites.

• Avoid being outdoors at dawn and dusk when mosquitoes are most active.
• Wear light colors, long sleeves, and long pants when spending time outside in mosquito-infested areas.
• Use a DEET-based repellent when outside where mosquitoes are present (pay attention to usage instructions) 
• When camping or spending time outdoors, consider Permethrin treated bed-nets, tents, or clothing. 
• Avoid perfume, colognes, or other heavy scents that may attract mosquitoes.
• Drain outdoor containers that hold water for a week. Clogged rain gutters, birdbaths, and flooded ditches are all good environments for mosquitoes to thrive.
• When extracting a tick, use sharp pointed tweezers and get as close as you can to the embedded mouthparts. Slowly and gently pull the tick from the sick. Be sure not to twist or break the tick as these actions can leave parts of the tick in your body and cause infection.
• Wear long pants, long sleeves, and long socks to keep ticks off your skin. Light-colored clothing will help you spot ticks more easily. If you’ll be outside for an extended period of time, tape the area where your pants and socks meet to prevent ticks from crawling under your clothes.
• Remove ticks from your clothes before going indoors. To kill ticks that you may have missed, wash your clothes with hot water and dry them using high heat for at least one hour.
• Perform daily tick checks after being outdoors, even in your own yard.

If you have been bitten by either a tick or mosquito, it is important to watch for symptoms of harmful diseases. Common symptoms for Lyme disease include headache, fever, enlargement of the bitten area with a pale center, aches, and swollen lymph nodes. Common symptoms for West Nile Virus include fever, headache, muscle aches, nausea, vomiting, lack of appetite, and skin rash. If you start to experience signs and symptoms, seek medical attention immediately.

Content in this health message came from ucdh.net and mayoclinic.com.