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Home > Portable Practical Pediatrics > Identifying/ Managing Insect Bites (Pedcast)


	Podcast:		Portable Practical Pediatrics
	Episode:		Identifying/ Managing Insect Bites (Pedcast)
	Category:		Kids & family
	Duration:		00:00:00
	Publish Date:		2017-09-24 09:10:45
	Description:		Introduction DocSmo here with another edition of Portable Practical Pediatrics. From the onesie all the way to the three-piece if it involves kids, we talk about it here. Thanks for joining me today. I've got another biking story for you today. You know I'm part of the "Biking friends", a group of adults and sometimes kids, who go biking weekly to a bakery or a coffee shop. We bike about 25 miles and have lots of interesting conversations along the way. Well, in one of my most recent outings with the group I got to ride along side a teen with a rash. His mom was also riding and she asked me to take a look at his rash that was around his upper arm. Mom's question for me was should she take him to urgent care or even the emergency department since his spots looked bigger and angrier than they had the day before. His rash was getting worse and she was worried. I knew the likely outcome of one of those ED or urgent care visits- lots of medications and therapies that are often unnecessary. So let's break down this young man's rash a little more in today's pedcast and give you my thoughts about a how to identify and manage his rash that turned out to be from insect bites. I'll also tell you what I told this young man to do to care for his rash that turned out to be easy and very inexpensive. Musical introduction How does a parent recognize that the skin spot is a bite? What I saw on this young man when I took a look at his skin was a crop of red spots on his upper arm. The marks looked like typical insect bite reactions. More on that in a minute. He couldn't recall having been bitten by anything so I deduced that they were likely large mosquito bites for the following reasons: he hadn't noticed being bitten-typical of mosquitos (check), the red spots were on exposed skin where insects have easy access to bite (check), the rash was on the upper body, an area not usually accessible to crawling insects but rather flying ones (check), the center of the red spot was elevated compared to the rest of the spot which is typical of an insect bite (check), the spots were itchy but not painful (check), and the spots were grouped into multiple wheals in the same area (typical for bites-check). These were bites! Turns out, there are thousands of insects all around your children that potential can bite them, but in this young man's case, I thought mosquitos were the most likely insect causing the rash for the reasons I just stated. The spots were large and a little angry looking when I saw them but I still thought they were uncomplicated mosquito bites. Let's take the mosquito as our prototype insect bite and analyze what happens in the skin of a child who gets bitten. I think once you begin to recognize the signs of an insect bite, you will be able to identify bite marks on your children since most insect bites look very similar. What happens in a child's skin when they are bitten? When a mosquito bite occurs, skin bacteria and venom from the mosquito and possibly even viruses that are carried by the mosquito are injected into the skin of your child. Within minutes to hours of an insect bite, your child's immune system leaps into action, recognizing that something foreign has entered the child's skin. The skin barrier has been breached. Alarms go off and your child's immune system goes into action with swelling that dilutes the toxins, blood vessels dilating that bring in cells to detoxify and neutralize the venoms as well as killing bacteria that have entered the skin and repairing the damage to the broken skin. All these processes cause your child's skin to develop the cardinal signs and symptoms of inflammation: swelling, heat, redness, and itch/pain. Other conditions can cause your child's skin to become inflamed but bites from insects is one of the more common conditions that lead to skin inflammation and this inflammation is most intense at the center of the bite. That's why if you feel these swellings,
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