TOUCHED BY LYME: My letter published in San Francisco Chronicle
The San Francisco Chronicle gave great coverage to Stanford’s recent study showing a high prevalence of infected ticks in the Bay Area. However, I felt that the article’s advice to shower after hiking to get rid of ticks needed more explanation. The newspaper published my letter to the editor today:
Tick threat
Thank you for this important article alerting people in the Bay Area to the risk of tick-borne infections (“Area not free of ticks,” Aug. 27). One point deserves amplification. Showering will only wash away ticks that haven’t latched on. It won’t do a darn thing for attached ticks, the ones in immediate position to harm you.
However, showering is a good time to check for attached ticks in all your creases and crevices. We recommend soaping up and running your hands all over your body—especially the hidden parts—feeling for small bumps that might be embedded ticks.
The sooner a tick is removed, the less opportunity it has to infect you. More information about protecting yourself from ticks at www.lymedisease.org. ~Dorothy Leland
Click here for more information about protecting yourself from ticks.
TOUCHED BY LYME is written by Dorothy Kupcha Leland, LymeDisease.org’s VP for Education and Outreach. She is co-author of When Your Child Has Lyme Disease: A Parent’s Survival Guide, to be published in September 2015. Contact her at dleland@lymedisease.org.
KUDOS DOROTHY! great letter about checking the “hidden” areas…pubic, etc.
Dorothy, so you have a book coming out; can you tell us more please especially the FONT used in it whether it’s legible to extreme neuro lyme folks like me. Example, I can’t read timesnewroman/similar fonts.
Verdana or arial are the ones I can read well like what your lymedisease.org site is set up like.
now an author too….. congrats my online friend.
bettyg, iowa activist
46.5 yrs. chronic lyme
35 yrs. MISDIAGNOSED by 40-50 drs.
UNACCEPTABLE
Bettyg. You are so, so right MISDIAGNOSED by 40-50 drs. in UNACCEPTABLE. Just a suggestion, if Dorothy’s new book were available as a pdf download, you could enlarge the print until you could read it. Maybe this would help, maybe not. Just a thought. I know Dorothy needs to protect her rights to get paid for each book, just trying to think of something.
Any advice that has the potential of preventing anyone from getting Lyme disease is so valuable. Too bad you could not mention a recommendation of seeing an LLMD in case someone gets flu symptoms that won’t go away after being out in the wild, woods or whatever. Thank you Dorothy for you faithful service in trying to bring tick born awareness as Lyme disease is such a scourge and so devistating.