You shouldn't salt a leech that's sucking your blood (2019)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/bloodsuckers-1.5361074

60•pabs3•3d ago

Comments

willsmith72•5h ago

I don't buy the alternatives at all.

> Instead, he recommends using a fingernail or a credit card to break the seal between the leech's mouth and your skin quickly

Far easier said than done. If it were that easy why even go for the salt?

> Another option is to wait until the leech is done feeding so it will fall off on its own

I'm just gonna wait 30+ minutes with a leech on me? no thanks

kstrauser•5h ago

Yeah, no. “Also consider just letting the spider lay eggs in your ear and then it will move along on its own.” Uh, that’s not gonna happen.

lukan•4h ago

The difference with spiders laying eggs in your ear, is that leeches sucking on your body is a regognized medical treatment for various things.

They don't lay eggs, they don't infest you. They just suck blood and are gone.

But just nitpicking on your example. I had leeches involuntarily on me for real where I just ripped them off and I don't think I would ever considering letting them suck till they are full.

benoau•4h ago

Makes you wonder what we have been missing out on in terms of spider-based treatments...

kstrauser•4h ago

A colonoscopy is a legitimate, useful medical procedure, but I don’t want one of those to sneak up on me either.

I think I could tolerate a medical leech if required. I wouldn’t love it, but you gotta do what you’ve gotta do. I would be less tolerant of one randomly taking a meal from my leg.

themafia•4h ago

Real things people said on 911 calls:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPSEw8XnjH8

Terr_•3h ago

I dunno, I think I'd rather dribble in some hydrogen peroxide to sterilize and remove the eggs, as opposed to getting a spider bite on the inside of my ear canal.

Now that I think about it, I have no idea what hydrogen peroxide does to spiderweb material. It seems like the kind of thing one might learn during a childhood phase of mostly-unthinking cruelty to animals.

jonny_eh•5h ago

So are you suggesting that you would pour salt on it?

david-gpu•5h ago

If you would rather follow your gut because the expert's recommendation sounds "too easy, then picture a similar scenario in your own area of expertise where you give friendly advise to a random person and they react like that to your advice.

raincole•4h ago

If the article has a video or something showing how to "using a fingernail or a credit card to break the seal" I'd be so much more convinced.

I can't even imagine how to do that correctly when I'm sitting in an air-conditioned room so the chance I'll able to "break the seal" in the wild as the expert suggests is around zero. Especially the article says one has to do it "quickly" so it doesn't have time to vomit blood back into me.

girvo•3h ago

It's really not that difficult. You scrape them off you with the edge of the card, where they attach to you

roxolotl•5h ago

As someone who’s had leeches on me, North Eastern America, and never even heard of salting them I’ve always just treated them like a bandaid and ripped them off quickly. The hardest part really is grabbing them since they are slippery. I assume there’s nastier leeches out there though where that might be a bad idea.

themafia•4h ago

I would always put the area with the leech back into the water and then use a sharp edged rock to scrape them off. They seemed a little bit more willing to leave my skin doing it that way.

throwway120385•4h ago

Tweezers or tongs in a first aid kit are pretty useful for that and for removing ticks.

xattt•3h ago

Is there anything tongs can’t do?

jorvi•3h ago

Leeches will pop off easily. There's a nastier cousin of leeches (lampreys) that I think you'll rip a small chunk of flesh out if you'd yank them off forcefully.

Terr_•3h ago

I'd like to emphasize that they are metaphorical cousins only, being segmented-worms and jawless-fish respectively. :p

P.S.: "Would you rather fight one lamprey-sized leech, or 400 leech-sized lampreys?"

3s•4h ago

> Far easier said than done. If it were that easy why even go for the salt?

I think it's more gross to pluck it out. Hence why people just pour salt on it or let it finish feeding maybe? Leeches can be really viscerally repulsive to look at and touch

strken•3h ago

In my experience, the reason people don't scrape them off is the rumour that they leave their mouthparts behind.

Removing the terrestrial leeches that live near me in Australia is easy. Put the edge of a credit card a few cm away, resting against your skin at a slight angle, and then quickly scrape the leech away like you're scraping paint.

3s•5h ago

I was once hiking in the dark in the south of Japan. I crossed a few streams but didn't think much of it. A while later, I felt like my socks were sticking to my shoes and unusually warm. I looked down to see my ankles and shoes covered in blood. Totally drenched in dark red blood with 10 leeches attached. This was truly the most confused and terrified I ever felt in my life - seeing that much blood without feeling any pain was utterly disorienting.

GiorgioG•5h ago

What’s with the cliffhanger? :)

How did you get them off?

3s•4h ago

I scraped and plucked them off, not the safest way to get rid of them apparently...

coda_•4h ago

Isn't that exactly what the article said you should do?

stavros•4h ago

He didn't. They're still there.

kerblang•5h ago

Nice positive article about leeches, includes bonus pitch for maggots

https://nymag.com/vindicated/2016/11/how-leeches-made-their-...

FredPret•4h ago

I've never felt keener to limit my explorations to the great indoors

conkeisterdoor•3h ago

Ah, a fellow indoorsman. :)

thinkingtoilet•4h ago

It's the same with Ticks! People will say to burn them off but if you do that they will throw up and increase the likelihood of disease transmission. You want to pull them off in one clean pull.

jagged-chisel•3h ago

Slowly, attempting to not pop off the head before it is removed from your body.

loloquwowndueo•3h ago

Really hard to get the suckers (literally) off using regular tweezers without squeezing them into regurgitation and death. They sell special tick removal tools that look like a tiny two-prong fork which grabs them from the … face I guess… and allows removing them cleanly.

easygenes•3h ago

I’ve used those and they are a bit fiddly. The best tool I’ve found are the needle pointed angled precision tweezers (like they mostly sell for electronics work).

thinkingtoilet•3h ago

If you live in an area with ticks, getting tick tweezers is a must. The ones we have have the fork you mention on one end, but what is much better is it has tweezers on the other end that have a hockey stick like curve at the bottom and come to a very small point. Very easy to grab a small tick and pull it off.

alexjplant•2h ago

You're also supposed to save the tick to make diagnosis of tick-borne illness easier. Years ago I had what felt like a four-day hangover after getting bit so I went to the doctor; he gave me Doxy and sent my blood off to the lab which later confirmed that I had Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Supposedly it's easier/more conclusive to test the tick itself for pathogens than your blood.

cogman10•34m ago

Pantyhose is another thing to consider. It's pretty much the perfect anti-tick measure. It's not too hot and the ticks can't make their way through it. I know a few farmers who use it when going out into the bushes, they never get ticks.

amelius•3h ago

There's also a tiny lasso tool that you can loop around it and tighten, making throwing up impossible.

femto•3h ago

In Australia the current medical advice for ticks is [1]:

"For ticks that can be seen (adult ticks), freeze the tick to kill it where it is"

"For ticks that can hardly be seen – use permethrin cream to kill the tick where it is"

You can buy tick freezing spray, which is used in a similar way to wart freezing spray.

[1] https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/2022-11/manage...

Edit: Here is the research on which the medical advice is based. Dated 2019 by Australian researchers, so the updated practise might not be widely deployed outside Australia.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6494660/

Edit: A comprehensive resource on tick treatment, including justification for the freezing advice.

https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-01/preven...

Edit: and finally, the ABC Catalyst video segment demonstrating the technique.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j77nrTVM_j8

spangry•2h ago

This is good advice. You can buy “wart-off” freezing spray over the counter at a pharmacy to do this.

jaybrendansmith•4h ago

I had 20 leeches in the bottoms of both feet when I was a kid. They were borrowed in there...there was no removing them manually. Fortunately my quick-thinking parent had spray mosquito repellant - sprayed the bottom of my feet and the leeches all let go and crawled out in about 15 seconds. So use spray mosquito repellant is my personal recommendation.

loloquwowndueo•3h ago

*burrowed

quesera•1h ago

Are you sure they were leeches?

A quick (horrified) web search suggests that there are no leech species that burrow into flesh.

dragonwriter•1h ago

IIRC, all chemical removal methods (including DEET/mosquito repellant) have the same potential downsides as salting; they increase the risk of the leech vomiting back into the wound and causing an infection.

mikae1•4h ago

I used to burn off ticks with a lighter (revenge!) until I learned the same thing was true for them.

The risk of getting a disease is apparently higher if you handle them that way, essentially making it their revenge.

temp0826•3h ago

Why not both? My tactic is to pull them off cleanly as possible then torch em.

mikae1•3h ago

Excellent advice!

StarlaAtNight•4h ago

This headline sounds like a euphemism for something or one of those folksy sounding bits of wisdom

ceroxylon•3h ago

Same here, I thought it was going to be an analogy for a political story.

Now that I know it is literal leeches and that the options are scraping them off or waiting for them to finish, avoiding areas with leeches feels like the move.

Yamanot.es: A music box of train station melodies from the JR Yamanote Line

Altered states of consciousness induced by breathwork accompanied by music

Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published

Toyota is recycling old EV batteries to help power Mazda's production line

Google has eliminated 35% of managers overseeing small teams in past year

About Containers and VMs

Unexpected productivity boost of Rust

Launch HN: Bitrig (YC S25) – Build Swift apps on your iPhone

Show HN: Meetup.com and eventribe alternative to small groups

VIM Master

The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

Read three top CDC officials' resignation emails

Using information theory to solve Mastermind

Implementing Forth in Go and C

A failure of security systems at PayPal is causing concern for German banks

The National Design Studio is a scam

How to slow down a program and why it can be useful

Object-oriented design patterns in C and kernel development

Reverse-engineering the Globus INK, a Soviet spaceflight navigation computer (2023)

Efficient Array Programming

3D printing a building with 756 windows

Lago – Open-Source Usage Based Billing – Is Hiring in Sales, Eng, Ops (EU, US)

'Rocks as big as cars' are flying down the Dolomites

Bring Your Own Agent to Zed – Featuring Gemini CLI

Internet Access Providers Aren't Bound by DMCA Unmasking Subpoenas–In Re Cox

Monodraw

Typepad is shutting down

Areal, Are.na's new typeface

SDS: Simple Dynamic Strings library for C

What we find in the sewers