Most tick bites in Australia don’t cause serious harm, and you can remove a tick at home without medical help. A feeding tick buries its mouthparts into your skin and can stay attached for up to five days. Australian first aid sets out one way to remove a tick, and you can buy what you need from any pharmacy.
Where Tick Bites Happen in Australia
Where you spend your time outdoors shapes how likely you are to need to remove a tick. Ticks favour humid, bushy places, including wet forests, temperate rainforest, gullies, and the grassy areas around them. They cannot travel far, so they wait on grass and low bushes and attach themselves to any animal or person brushing past.
Ticks also live well outside bushland. Suburban gardens, school grounds, sports fields, and coastal walking tracks inside that band can all have ticks, and pets bring them indoors on their coats. Bandicoots, possums, kangaroos, and other native animals act as the usual hosts, which is part of why leafy suburbs backing onto reserves see so many ticks.
Signs and Symptoms of a Tick Bite
Many people find a tick already attached before they have any reason to remove a tick. Their saliva contains numbing venom, so the bite itself does not hurt.
An attached tick looks like a small dark freckle with a scab, or like a new mole. They favour soft skin and hairy areas, so give your scalp, behind your ears, your armpits, your groin, and the backs of your knees a close check.
Ticks feed for several days. An attached tick becomes far easier to spot as its body swells with blood. An adult tick measures about 4 millimetres before a blood feed and about 10 millimetres afterwards, and its body lightens from black or brown to blue-grey as it feeds. Redness, itching, and swelling around the bite site are the signs most people notice. A mild allergic reaction can also appear at the bite site and last for several days.
Tick paralysis is rare. Early symptoms include headache, blurred vision, weakness in your limbs, poor balance, trouble walking in a straight line, sensitivity to bright light, and tender lymph nodes. Partial facial paralysis can also occur. Symptoms may continue worsening even after the tick has been removed.
Lyme Disease, DSCATT, and Tick Bites in Australia
Lyme disease is caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi and occurs in parts of North America, Europe, the United Kingdom, and Asia. Scientists have not found that bacterium in Australian ticks.
The Australian government instead recognises Debilitating Symptom Complexes Attributed to Ticks (DSCATT) which describes ongoing illness from a tick bite. The symptoms reported most are fatigue, confusion, changes in sensation, joint pain, and headache.
There are several tick-borne diseases which do occur in Australia, including Queensland tick typhus, Australian spotted fever, and Flinders Island spotted fever belong to the same family of infections. A rash appears in many cases, alongside fever, headache, flu-like symptoms, and tender lymph nodes. These infections need the tick to stay attached to you for at least 24 hours.
First Aid to Remove the Tick and Aftercare
Australian first aid to safely remove is to kill it where you find it, then let it fall off on its own. Freeze it in place with an ether-containing spray, which should kill it in about five minutes. The dead tick will drop off on its own.
If the tick is too small to freeze, dab a generous amount of permethrin cream onto it instead. Apply the cream at least twice with a one-minute break between applications, then scrape the tick off after 60 to 90 minutes using a sharp-edged scraper, taking care not to damage your skin.
If someone has trouble breathing, a swollen throat, dizziness, or collapses after a tick bite, or if the tick does not drop off, call triple zero and use an adrenaline autoinjector if one is available. If you already know you are allergic to tick bites, leave the tick alone and get urgent medical help.
For aftercare, clean the bitten area and your hands with soap and water, then disinfect it with antiseptic and cover it with a clean dressing. Keep an eye on the bite site over the following weeks, and see a doctor if a rash appears, if you develop a fever, or if you feel unwell.
How NOT to Remove a Tick
Australian guidance advises against tweezers of any kind to remove a tick as the pressure can squeeze more tick saliva into your body. Any attempt to pull straight up on an attached tick can tear the tick’s body away from its head, and the tick’s head or mouthparts left behind can keep your wound open and add to your risk of infection. Do not squeeze the tick, and do not try to remove it with tweezers, hooks, or your fingernails even after it has died.
Never apply any of these to an attached tick:
- methylated spirits
- kerosene
- petroleum jelly
- nail polish or nail polish remover
- oil
- rubbing alcohol
- a lighted match
Do not try to burn a tick off. Do not twist, jerk, or agitate it either. If you spend time where ticks are common, look at an itch before you scratch it to see if it’s a tick.
Preventing Tick Bites Outdoors
The measures that prevent tick bites are simple enough to become routine. Keep your skin covered by wearing a long-sleeved shirt tucked into your trousers, tucking your trousers into your socks, and wearing a wide-brimmed hat. Light-coloured clothing makes a crawling tick far easier to spot against the fabric before it finds your skin.
Use an insect repellent containing DEET, picaridin, or lemon eucalyptus on exposed skin or as close to the skin as possible. Apply an insecticide containing permethrin to your clothing when heading into areas where ticks are found. Follow the label on both products, and reapply skin repellent as directed rather than assuming one application covers a full day outdoors.
Avoid pushing through bush and long grass where you can, and take extra care after rain, when the humidity suits ticks best. Stay on cleared tracks instead of brushing along vegetated edges. Afterwards, brush down your clothes and check your skin before you go inside, then put your clothes through a hot dryer for 20 minutes to kill any ticks still on the fabric.
If you live in a tick area, treating your yard with an insecticide approved by the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority reduces tick numbers around your home, and a pest manager can handle that for you.
Learn First Aid to Remove Ticks
The right way to remove a tick belongs to the bites and stings side of first aid, and our HLTAID011 Provide First Aid course covers poisoning and envenomation response. The same class teaches CPR for adults, children, and infants, wound care, burns, fractures, and use of an automated external defibrillator.
Ticks are part of ordinary life along the Australian east coast, and the response to a tick bite is short once you have practised it. First aid training is what lets you act on a tick you find tonight without stopping to look anything up.
FAQs
Can A Tick Bite Cause Anaphylaxis?
Yes. Anaphylaxis from a tick bite has only been recorded with bites from adult ticks. This can happen even after you remove a tick.
What Is Mammalian Meat Allergy?
Mammalian meat allergy is an allergy to red meats that can develop after a tick bite. The allergy can appear weeks or months after the bite, including in people who had no reaction to the tick itself. Symptoms then start four to six hours after you eat red meat and range from gut pain and welts through to anaphylaxis.
Can You Get Q Fever From A Tick?
Yes, although it does not happen often. Q fever can pass to people through a tick bite, through breathing in tick faeces, and through other contact with ticks such as removing them from pets or shearing sheep. A Q fever vaccine is available in Australia.
