If you’ve ever had to deal with a bee sting, an allergic reaction to a mosquito bite, or chiggers, you know it’s important to act quickly.

The key to dealing with insect bites and stings is this: act quickly, and get as much of the venom or saliva out of (or off) your skin as soon as possible. The insect’s venom or saliva is what is causing you the pain or itch. The sooner you remove the causal agent, the less severe of a reaction you’ll experience.

The following are do-it-yourself, first aid tips that will help you get ahead of the insect bite before too much damage has been done.

Bee or Wasp Stings

The trick with bee and wasp stings is to remove the stinger as quickly as possible and as completely as possible. You don’t want to leave any of the stinger in the skin at all. Most people find a credit card to be an effective tool for scraping the stinger out, but a long fingernail can work just as effectively and is usually available right away.

After you get the stinger out, apply one of the following to the sting site:

• A paste of baking soda and water
• White vinegar
• Half of an onion (sliced side on the sting site)
• An aloe vera leaf, split open (the wet, juicy inside is what will help the sting site)

None of these remedies will take the place of an Epipen in case of a serious allergic reaction. However, these strategies should alleviate the pain quickly if you are not seriously allergic to bee or wasp stings.

Mosquito Bites

Some people handle mosquito bites just fine, but some people swell up terribly. (I happen to be one of those people). However, there’s an easy, effective do-it-yourself remedy that works wonders for me and may for you also.

As soon as you realize you’ve been bitten, wash the area with warm soapy water. Dry the bite and then apply a couple drops of olive oil infused with comfrey leaves.

What’s comfrey, you ask? An herb that’s probably growing in your yard right now. You can order live comfrey plants online and grow them in a pot on your patio or in your garden. I keep a jar of olive oil with comfrey leaves in it nearby for any unidentified insect bites, and it usually relieves the sting, itch, and swelling right away.

Chigger Bites

You’ll read all kinds of crazy remedies for chiggers, but the important thing to realize is there are no chiggers under your skin. Because of the way chigger bites rise up and form rigid bumps, people mistaken think the chiggers have burrowed inside your skin and need to be suffocated. Whatever you do, do NOT put nail polish, bleach, paint thinner, or any other crazy substance on your chigger bites. You’ll just make an itchy situation worse.

Chiggers remain on the surface of your skin and actually can be washed or even wiped away quite easily with a damp cloth. In fact, it’s a good idea to carry a wet wipe in your pocket when you’re out in the woods or garden so you can swipe at your exposed ankles and knees (the most common place for chiggers to bite) once in a while.

If you’ve got chigger bites, wash the area with warm soapy water and concentrate on soothing the irritated skin. You can use ice (wrapped in a towel), hot baths, and aloe vera (split open a leaf and rub the juice on the bites). The maddening itch is from the chigger’s saliva; it causes a reaction in our skin that makes the cells around the bite become hard and raised. However, the best thing you can do for chigger bites is to soothe the area and resist scratching (which can make the bites itch worse and turn into open wounds).

As with all insect bites, see a doctor if you have serious allergy symptoms such as swelling of the face or throat or difficulty breathing.

Author Bio:

Erinn Stam is the Managing Editor for nursing scholarships. She attends Wake Technical Community College and is learning about grants for nursing students. She lives in Durham, NC with her lovely 4-year-old daughter and exuberant husband.

From Survival Blog – Ten Essential OTC Medications to Stockpile by Cynthia J. Koelker, MD

Are over-the-counter (OTC) drugs really worth stockpiling?  As a family physician my answer is a resounding yes.  Most of the following were actually prescription medications when first released.  (In higher dosages, several still are.)  Although other OTC drugs are worth considering, these ten have been selected due to their…

This has just become one of my emergency preparedness shopping lists.

The other day, I posted about first aid and how I realized that I don’t even own a first aid manual. I decided I needed to do something about it, so I took a look around the internet and found the first aid wikibook. The book has some good basic information. The problem is that the book is online, and thus it’s useless if you ever really need to look something up quickly. Also, the book page offers a couple of pdf downloads, but both of them had the same problem: a lack of a useful table of contents (as in a table of contents that has page numbers on it).

So I sat down, cut and pasted until my mouse clicking finger bled, and put together a pdf of the information in the way I wanted it. The file has a little bit of a margin on the left so you can print it and bind it however you’d like. Just right click the picture and choose “save as”.

First Aid pdf

If you’d like a printed, spiral bound version of this book, you can buy one at Lulu.com. First Aid – Printed and Coil Bound

In accordance with the wikibooks site, this pdf is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This post got me thinking about first aid the other day: Medical Series Number One

I realized that even though I’ve had some basic first aid training, it’s been a long time since I’ve really studied up on it. I haven’t been certified in CPR since I was in Boy Scouts. I also don’t have any good First Aid manuals around my house or in my emergency kit.

Here’s some info I found online as I started to look into first aid again.

First Aid @ the Mayo Clinic

First Aid Tutorial

However, online info is pretty much worthless in the hour you need to apply first aid. (“Hold on, don’t die, just let me run inside and check the internet real quick.”) Even a book for that matter is not great, but at least you can throw the book in a emergency kit bag or the back seat of your car. I suppose the best thing is to read up regularly and keep it fresh in your mind.

I’ve considered taking the Red Cross’s online First Aid certification course. Does anybody out there know if this is a worthwhile thing to do?

https://www.redcrossonlinetraining.org/Distance/Default.aspx?CID=54