What’s Going Around: Strep, stomach bug, swimmer’s ear

This week, pediatricians at Penn State Health Children’s Hospital are seeing stomach bugs, upper respiratory infections and some COVID.

This week, the providers at UPMC Children’s Community Pediatrics in York and Spring Grove are seeing swimmer’s ear and viral syndrome.

WellSpan Community Pediatrics is not seeing a lot of infections like strep or COVID right now. However, they are seeing a few cases of community acquired pneumonia and are mainly treating summer incidents – like splinters, sutures and broken bones.

Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health Physicians Roseville Pediatrics says they are still treating kids for strep throat this week. They also saw a number of tick bites, although cases of Lyme Disease were down.

There was an increase in cases of the stomach bug, ongoing swimmer’s ear complaints and a variety of rashes, including hand, foot and mouth, sunburn, poison ivy, eczema and post-viral rashes.

Dr. Joan Thode offered the following advice about ticks:

“Ticks are plentiful in Lancaster, in trees, bushes, and mainly grass. All ticks rely on drinking blood for their survival, and they can do this on any organism. Ticks can be carriers of Lyme disease if they had a blood meal of a Lyme-infected animal, and in our area of America, the Lyme carriers are field mice, not deer. The ticks themselves are not infected; the Lyme organisms are in their stomachs.

This is great news in a way, because ticks do NOT carry Lyme disease in their saliva. It’s only in the stomachs of ticks who have fed on the blood of the infected mice. The only way that a tick can give a human Lyme disease is if it first gets the Lyme organism in its stomach and then attaches to a human host and drinks enough blood to cause the tick’s stomach to expand so much that it regurgitates some of the Lyme-containing stomach contents into the wound site.

For a tick to get this engorged, it needs to be attached for 36 to 48 hours. If it gets found and removed prior to this time, and prior to becoming engorged, it will not have transmitted Lyme. That is why it is so important to do tick checks and remove ticks quickly.

The best way to remove a tick is to use sharp tweezers and grip the tick at the base of the head. Don’t grip the body to avoid squeezing the stomach. Lift straight up with a decent amount of force. The tick’s saliva has a cement-like substance that glues its face into the skin to remove it from the skin. This can be done at home, though if unable to remove the tick or concerned, you can have the tick removed at your child’s health provider.

If the tick’s body detaches from its head during this removal process, there is no need to dig into the skin to remove the head—the body will deal with the embedded head in the same way it deals with a splinter by surrounding it with white blood cells and either disintegrating it within the skin or extruding it out within the small fluid pocket. If the tick body is off, the tick is dead and no longer poses a risk of Lyme transmission. Let the body’s immune system take care of the rest rather than risking skin infection, scarring, and pain.

Preventing Lyme disease after an engorged tick bite:

If an engorged tick is found attached to the skin, take a photo, remove the tick, and call your health care provider as a single dose of doxycycline can prevent Lyme disease in this initial bite stage. Again, this step is not needed if the tick is removed prior to getting engorged as there will be no infected tick puke to worry about coming in contact with the blood of the host.

Preventing Tick bites:

Prevention with tick checks is important, but another aspect of prevention is bug spray with DEET. There has been a lot of concern circulated that DEET, which stands for the chemical name of diethyltoluamide, within bug sprays could have a negative effect on the nerve cells of kids. There has been no scientific evidence in studies that DEET affects nerve cells of humans when applied to uncovered skin. Where it can become harmful is if a child drinks it, so it’s important to keep these products away from their reach.

Babies younger than two months should not be sprayed with DEET-containing products as their skin is very absorbent, though beyond two months, these products have been deemed safe. For the little babies, bug nets and avoidance are the prevention techniques of choice.”

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