WHEN were they vaccinated? There was a vaccine in the usa which was withdrawn. Is it still available in Europe ?

I took part in a pilot program about a decade ago, but it disappeared without trace. So now there is a vaccine for dogs, but not people!

Apparently, some people have been able to persuade their vets to administer the vaccine. How the hell that works beats me.

A tip, if you are bitten by a tick it is better, if you can, not to rip it off forcibly but to burn it with the end of a lit cigarette. So it retracts its jaws and can be removed with minimal force.

Dunno - I just remember there being threads about people taking their kids to have it done if they lived in the more Germanic, heavily-forested parts of Switzerland. We lived there from early 2008 to late 2011, so some time in that window.

Another way is to use a loop of cotton thread - loop it over the tick where it meets the skin, then gently pull the ends of the thread to close around the juncture, and gradually squeeze out the biting bit. This works without applying any pressure to the body and therefore having the risk of squirting the partially-digested blood back in, which I vaguely think is a problem for Lyme or maybe just general infection.

My son got a tick once on his shoulder when we lived in rural Somerset, and the cotton method is the one I had to use, not having the right sort of tweezers to hand.

Where the heck are you supposed to get a cigarette from? And light it??

Ticks don't have retractable jaws, their mouth parts have barbs on. The most likely thing to happen if you put a cigarette on it is it will regurgitate into the host possibly increasing the risk of infection. Also you'll probably burn yourself.

Tweezers.

But won't burning it like this hurt/anger it? I've heard it's bad to do either, as that's when the tick may either clamp down harder and/or vomit up their poison?

I discovered it in the bath, where it floated a bit off my skin (attached by the head of course). It was very tiny, like an immature black sesame seed. I wrapped my fingers in loo tissue & took two careful tugs. I got the whole thing out, then ran to put it into a plastic Tupperware container (screeching a bit all the while).

LOL, yes, we wouldn't have such a thing at hand either. I assume Holly or a family member is a smoker.

We currently have a black widow spider - now dead - in a Tupperware container, that turned up in our pool umbrella over the weekend. I made a skree...skree edge-of-panic hissing noise throughout the whole process. I'm not spider-phobic, but you know... Black. Widow. Spider.

Irk.

Yes, but forget the tissue. Simply nip the creature gently with your finger nails and pull it off. Honestly I've done it maybe a hundred times, no problem, the animal is still alive and unharmed as far as I can tell (then I kill it.)

tick removal WebMD http://www.webmd.com/first-aid/tc/ho...-tick-overview

holly I think that is leeches not ticks

In practice, the usefulness of this is limited. This seems to apply to larger ticks, not deer ticks, which of course are tiny... much smaller than a pinhead. In particular, the WebMD page says not to use your bare hands. With a tiny deer tick, it would be hard to accurately grab it while using tissues, gloves etc.

Crazy! One would think that the dose for a person would be totally different than that for an animal -- and if the person had a bad reaction and ended up in the emergency room the vet would surely lose his license.

My OH uses the finger nail method to get them off me; being a klutz, I use tweezers on him. Then I swab the area with alcohol.