FOR SAFETY SAK E
continued from page 20 So, what can you do to protect yourself and your employees? Fortunately, there are several tactics to prevent ticks from latching on and reduce the risk of Lyme disease on the job: • Wear lighted colored clothing that makes it easier to spot ticks. • Cover up as much as possible—wear long sleeves, tuck pants into socks and wear a hat. • Consider using insect repellent with DEET on your skin and permethrin on your clothing. Permethrin lasts up to six weeks, even after several washes. • Do regular tick checks of your body, especially common areas where ticks tend to hide, including under arms, around ears, inside belly button, behind knees and especially in your hair. • Check clothing and any gear, as ticks will catch a ride on equipment and clothes to make their way into homes. • Redo tick checks after three days. If you’ve missed any ticks the first time around and they’ve had a chance to feed on you, they will be bigger and easier to spot.
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If you find a tick that has latched on, remove it carefully: • Use tweezers and gently tug straight up from skin – it may take two or three tries. • Save the tick in a plastic bag and store in the freezer to have it tested in case you develop symptoms of Lyme. Keeping tweezers, DEET, and permethrin on hand at a job site; encouraging workers to do tick checks and know the symptoms of this condition; and offering light-colored uniforms are some of the ways employers may be able to help prevent Lyme disease.
This article was written by Ana Thompson and had originally appeared on LandscapeManagement.net. At the time, Thomson was the executive director of the Bay Area Lyme Foundation, a national non-profit organization dedicated to making Lyme disease easy to diagnose and simple to cure. Visit them online at https://www.bayarealyme.org/ to learn more.