Reading 2

Unit 10- Reading 2

Page 153

You Wouldn’t Know It If It Bit You

The young woman had been looking forward to her nice new apartment in Manhattan. Circumstances turned out to be less comfortable than she expected, as this posting to an online forum about insect bites shows:

I just moved into a newly renovated apartment and got 10 huge, itchy bug bites on my arms, legs, and hip. I thought it was my mattress, so I got rid of it and bought a new one.

Still got bites and could not find bugs anywhere. I even tried freezing out my apartment by leaving the door open during the winter chill since I heard the bugs can’t survive in temps less than 25 degrees. No luck. I went to a dermatologist who said the bite pattern isn’t like any of the usual apartment pests, and he didn’t know what it was. I am miserable.

My immune system has reacted to the bites, and I have prickly itching ALL over my body, not just where the bites are, all day long. I called my landlord who is sending an exterminator over. Will post to let you know how it goes. If anyone has found the solution, please email me. Thank you!

UNSEEN BITERS

Every night, countless people crawl into bed knowing exactly how the writer feels. Instead of a peaceful night’s sleep, they will get a new round of bites by some mysterious pest.

Because they don’t know what’s plaguing them, they have no idea how to stop it. In extreme cases, a concern becomes an obsession. Weakened by a lack of sleep, a victim develops a feeling that biting creatures are everywhere. Bites and the fear of them establish a cruel regime, ruling the victim’s daytime thoughts and nighttime dreams.

Bites by arachnids-such as spiders and wu Licks- and by insects such as horseflies, mosquitoes, or bedbugs are extremely common. Virtually all humans who survive past infancy are bitten at some point in their lives. A bite, which involves a creature’s mouth parts, is different from a sting, which is made with a sharp structure appended to a creature’s rear end.

Most insect bites cause only minimal discomfort, if any at all. The bite might cause a little swelling because chemicals in the bug’s saliva irritate the skin. More serious problems are rare. When they do happen, the bite victim’s own behavior might be to blame. Your parents summarized it for you when you were young: “Don’t scratch those bites!” Scratching can open the skin and allow bacterial infections to get started.

Insects and arachnids account for almost all the bites people suffer, but they are identified less easily than any others. If a dog, a rodent, a horse, or even a snake bites you, you know that it has happened and which creature did it.

If an insect or spider bites you, you may not even feel the contact of its mouth parts with your skin. You may realize you’ve been bitten only after an itchy bump develops a few hours later. Even if you did feel a bite, you probably could not identify the biter. Bugs are small. They move quickly.

They have evolved excellent methods of staying hidden. Only a small minority of biting pests are even seen, much less swatted or captured. More often, the victims are left to wonder what bit them.

LOOK-ALIKE MARKS

The body’s reaction to a bite may not help narrow down the suspects. Different biters can cause the same symptoms. For example, many Australians who develop puffy red spots on an arm or leg blame white-tail spiders, mostly because white tails are extremely common.

However, the sore spot may be caused by the bite of an insect or another spider, or even by contact with a fungus. Another confusing situation involves two arachnids common in the eastern United States—the deer tick, which can spread a serious sickness called Lyme disease, and the brown recluse spider, whose venom is strong enough to make human victims quite sick.

Deer tick and brown recluse bites leave similar external marks on a victim: a rash that looks like a bull’s-eye target, with alternating rings of dark and light skin.

Guessing a biter’s identity is no game. Being wrong can be dangerous. Doctors in Australia have developed effective medicines, known as antivenins, to treat bites from some of the continent’s many venomous spiders. Each antivenin, though, is specific to the venom from one type of spider.

No other antivenin is sufficient to neutralize the poison. There are risks as well when a North American doctor decides whether a bull’s-eye bite mark comes from a deer tick or a brown recluse. If it’s a tick bite but is treated as a spider bite, the po victim will not get antibiotics to fight Lyme disease, which causes serious heart or nerve conditions in about 10 percent of infected people.

If it’s a brown recluse bite but is treated as a tick bite, the spider’s venom will os do greater damage. One serious effect of long exposure to strong spider venoms is necrosis, or “tissue death.

Full-strength venom kills the skin, nerve, and muscle cells it touches, and the more contact, the more necrosis. That’s why it’s vital to correctly identify any biting spider and initiate treatment with the proper antivenin as soon as possible.

The frustrated victim of unknown bugs in her Manhattan apartment did not suffer from either Lyme disease or necrosis. Few people do. That does not mean she had things easy.

We can easily understand her confusion–and her discomfort-as itching overtakes us after a day at the beach (sand fleas? spiders?), an hour on 20 the bus (mites? flies?), or a few minutes of strolling through a grassy field (nearly anything).