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Strange Buzzing in 9-Year-Old Boy's Ear was Actually a Tick Embedded in His Eardrum:
Three days after a 9-year-old Connecticut boy started to hear a strange buzzing sound in his ear, his parents took him to a doctor at Yale New Haven Children's Hospital.
The boy reported that he had no pain in his ear, no hearing loss, and no ringing or signs of tinnitus. He said he'd been playing outdoors recently on school days.
Then the doctor, Erik Waldman, looked into the boy's ear and saw a true vision of horror—a brown arachnid burrowing into the epidermal layer of the eardrum and feasting on the child's blood.
The hospital captured an image of the tick lodged into the right tympanic membrane, which was published along with a case study on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
So, just pull the little bugger out and all is good, right? Not really. The eardrum is a thin membrane and just pulling out the tick would rupture the eardrum and could leave the child hearing impaired in that ear:
"The eardrum essentially acts as a part of a pretty complex lever mechanism to allow sound to travel from the outer ear into the inner ear and through the middle ear, where there are ossicles—small bones," Kasle told CNN. "You need that drum intact to get good sound."
Kasle was able to remove the tick's feeding structure with a fine hook tool. The boy's eardrum remained intact. Tests a month later revealed the child did not get rashes or fever from the tick.
That does it. From now on, I'm not going outside without a good pair of earplugs!
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday May 30 2019, @02:43PM (4 children)
City boy here, the smallest pests I have to deal with are pigeons and tourists.
I remember "knocking" insects off windows by putting drops of 1,1,1-trichloroethane (liquid paper thinner) way up higher up the window, which was volatile enough to completely evapourate, but dense enough to want to go straight downwards, hence hitting the insects. I'm not recommending shoving that in your ears though.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 30 2019, @04:03PM
Ticks embed their heads into the host. Destroying the body does not bring out the head. Pulling them out leaves a hole in the tissue.
These things are nasty fuckers and they only appear small. Ask any cat.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday May 30 2019, @04:12PM
Aside from still being embedded if it dies which still leaves it on the auditory membrane, true, any method other than rapid removal gives the tick the opportunity to regurgitate or disgorge it's blood content. That disgorging is thought to increase the risk of tick-borne infections. (If the blood is flowing into the tick there may not be opportunity for the pathogen to infect.)
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday May 30 2019, @04:57PM
You're kinda on the right track, with the olive oil. Ticks to have to breathe, and you can make them uncomfortable with oil, or soapy water. But, I've never had a tick actually back out of the skin. Maybe I'm just impatient or something, and don't wait long enough. But, make it hard for it to breathe, and he does sort of loosen up, making it easier to get ahold, and pull him out. Various old wives tales say you can do the same with hydrogen peroxide, petroleum jelly, motor oil, etc ad nauseum. In the ear though - no one expects to find a tick in there. Probably latched onto the kid when the tick was almost invisibly small (I won't say microscopic, but tiny) and rode around there for weeks, before the kid noticed any problem.
I hate ticks. I need to be reminded again, why the hell I came south, before settling down. Ticks are extremely rare where I grew up in Pennsylvania. Here, in Arkansas, you just live with them. Pets run interference, but you still have to get them off the pets.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 30 2019, @06:21PM
What? Don't you want to let big pharma empty your wallet? Why don't you trust doctors? Fixing problems yourself is just wroooonng, the middle ages where nothing was regulated says hi, drool, drool, drool.