Is It Safe To Pull Ticks Off With Your Fingers?
On our TickEase YouTube channel, lots of people told us they pull ticks off with their fingers.
So I made this new video explaining why that's likely to expose you or your pet to what I call "yucky tick juice" that could make you sick. Â
And then sure, the first thing you want to do is: "Oh my God, there's a tick on my dog, I want to get this off." But that is not the best or the safest way to remove ticks.
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The Safest Way to Remove a Tick
You have a lot of surface area on your fingers. The last thing you want to do with an attached tick is to actually agitate it. If you get it upset, it's not gonna be happy.
Squeezing it in the abdomen can actually cause contents of that tick to be pushed out into the bite, whether or not that tick ruptures. You get exposed to yucky tick juice - the fluid within that tick that contains all the bad germs. This is something you want to avoid at all costs.
It is much better to simply grasp the tick with TickEase tweezers and lift straight up. Because again, you don't want to rupture that tick.You need to get the tick out as quickly as possible, because the longer a tick is attached, the more of a chance you have of being exposed to the yucky tick juice.
So please, avoid using your fingers.
What happens if you get tick pathogens on your fingers?
Lyme Disease is named after the scientist Willie Burgdorfer.The Lyme pathogen is called Borrelia Burgdorferi. He had some of this yucky tick juice on his fingers, ended up touching his eye, and developed lesions on his eyeball from it - just from that, just that simple rubbing his eye. You do not want anything like that to happen to you!
Use a sharp tweezer such as TickEase, or any other sharp tweezer that can go right down to the skin surface; squeeze the tick as close to the skin as possible, and then just pull straight up in a steady fashion. The tick will pop out.
Please don't use your fingers to remove a tick!!!