posted
Someone just returned from out of state (they were in the South) with what they call "chigger bites" - they are nasty, red, inflamed and some bites have blackish dots in the middle. Maybe not black exactly, more like dark areas covered by skin.
I have not seen them myself.
Does anyone know anything about chigger bites? Are chiggers known to spread disease? Could they possibly be tick nymphs instead? Could they drop off and lay eggs in the house?
IP: Logged |
I got many chigger bites a few years ago. I am not sure in regards to disease, but wanted to let you know that the only thing that helped was to apply clear nail polish to them...a couple of times a day. It suffocates them.
Posts: 117 | From Illinois | Registered: Apr 2008
| IP: Logged |
Melanie Reber
Frequent Contributor (5K+ posts)
Member # 3707
posted
Chiggers as disease vectors
Although the harvest mite chigger usually does not carry diseases in North American temperate climates, the mites are considered a dangerous pest in East Asia and the South Pacific because they often carry Rickettsia tsutsugamushi (Orientia tsutsugamushi), the tiny parasite that causes scrub typhus, which is known alternatively as the Japanese river disease, scrub disease, or tsutsugamushi. The mites usually are infected by the disease by their infected rodent hosts. The disease is transmitted to the next generation of offspring by breeding mites. Symptoms of scrub typhus in humans include fever, headache, muscle pain, cough, and gastrointestinal symptoms.
The North American genus and species can cause severe illness in children. This only occurs when the infestation is particularly heavy. Symptoms include a hallucinatory sense of floating outside one's body, fatigue, fever and general malaise.
Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome is an often-fatal disease thought to be transmitted exclusively by rodents. We report the first evidence of hantavirus-specific RNA (Bayou) from two trombiculid mites (chiggers) and an ixodid tick parasitizing wild-caught rodents at a field site in Texas and also from a trombiculid mite in the free-living predatory stage of the chigger life cycle collected from the same site.
Posts: 7052 | From Colorado | Registered: Mar 2003
| IP: Logged |
The Lyme Disease Network is a non-profit organization funded by individual donations. If you would like to support the Network and the LymeNet system of Web services, please send your donations to:
The
Lyme Disease Network of New Jersey 907 Pebble Creek Court,
Pennington,
NJ08534USA http://www.lymenet.org/
UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
Printer-friendly view of this topic