First Aid For Bites And Stings In Australia
It’s Essential To Know First Aid For Bites And Stings In Australia
Although a tick bite or a bee sting can be excruciatingly painful, most often they don’t cause any severe problems. You can have anaphylaxis to bites and stings, but they are quite rare.
It can cause widespread pain around the area of the skin, and it can become quite red and painful.
But normally, that’s the extent of it. It usually doesn’t end up being much more of a reaction than that. So stings around the face can cause serious envenomation and difficulty breathing even though a person may not have been allergic before.
When bees sting, they leave a little sack of venom, which they’ll continue to inject from that sack of venom. So you have to be really careful, and it continues to eject into the skin, whereas wasps and ants and things like that can sting you more than once, injecting toxins.
We have to be careful with ticks. And although you may not feel a tick like latching on, you may not see it or know it’s there until you can see it. They can inject a toxin that can cause irritants of the skin. They can also cause an allergic reaction like anaphylaxis, as can any of these.
These can be life-threatening; it doesn’t just have to be food, and there doesn’t need to have been any previous exposure to these kinds of things.
We have to remember that with anaphylaxis, with food, there are specific symptoms, which are tightness in your throat, the change in the voice, persistent cough and dizziness which is a blood pressure dropping.
But one of the symptoms of food allergy, one of the mild to moderate symptoms, is abdominal pain and vomiting, whereas, with a sting or a bite from an insect, abdominal pain and vomiting are signs of anaphylaxis.
Bee Sting First Aid
With a bee sting, what you should do is remove it by any means possible, try and find a leaf or a card or a credit card or anything like that.
With a tick, we need to be careful. So if you do find that you’ve got a tick on you, don’t panic and try to remove it immediately; the best way that you can remove a tick is by freezing it off. Things like wart spray. Take yourself to the nearest chemist or your GP. This way you’re going to kill it without actually injecting anything further into you.
First aid for bites and stings, if your child is not having a reaction, then just using a cold compress would be absolutely fine. There’s really not a lot else that you can do for these kinds of things if you’re not having a reaction but just remember to remove those stings, as quickly as possible so that they don’t continue to inject venom into you and with a tick, you have to have to freeze them first.
Want more? We’ve got you covered…
Our Baby First Aid Courses
Our baby first aid courses are available in person in your home and online. We run classes in your home with groups of 2, 4 or up to 10 in Sydney & Melbourne and you can book in 3 easy steps!
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We run most of the popular first aid courses Australia wide. HLTAID011 Provide First Aid, HLTAID009 Provide CPR, HLTAID012 Provide First Aid in an Education & Care Setting, RAMOAP (anaphylaxis), Mental Health first aid and CPR/LVR to name a few.
Book your public spot online or contact us if you have a group of 5+ people for onsite training.
Here are some other resources you may enjoy!
FREE GUIDE: Your Virtual Baby First Aid Kit
FREE GUIDE: Introducing Common Allergy Foods & Allergic Reactions
FREE Workplace Emergency Preparedness Plan: Grab this at the bottom of every page!
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