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Recommendations
The Doctors
Book of Home Remedies for Children
AUTHOR(S):
Denise Foley, Eileen Nechas, Susan Perry, Dena K. Salmon
and the
Editors of Prevention Magazine Health Books
BEE
STINGS
This
Season, Be Ready
It's a
lovely spring day. You're sitting on the patio, a magazine on your lap, an
iced drink nearby, enjoying the outdoors and listening to
the shouts and laughter of your children at play nearby. Suddenly
a scream pierces the air.
You rush to
the rescue to find a sobbing child pointing to a swelling on her arm. Your
youngster has run afoul of a flying insect of the stinging
variety. Whether honeybee, wasp, hornet or yellow jacket, the result is
similar--your child is in pain.
So here's
some advice from experts on how to ease the pain if your child gets stung. But
there are ways that children can avoid getting
stung, so you can pass along the experts' advice on how not to get stung in
the first place.
Treatment
Remove the
stinger. If your child is stung by a honeybee or bumblebee, the stinger will
be left behind. The stinger has a venom sac attached,
so you'll want to remove it. But don't try to pull it out, cautions John
Yunginger, M.D., professor of pediatrics at Mayo Medical
School and pediatrics consultant at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
Pulling the stinger can squeeze the venom sac and
release more venom. Instead, take a blunt-edged object such as a credit card,
knife or fingernail and gently scrape the stinger and
whisk it out.
Try a
''high-tech'' venom remover. After removing the stinger, you can use a product
called Sting X-Tractor (Poison Extractor, red.)--which
is sold in many outdoor and camping stores--to remove the venom, says Gary
Wasserman, D.O., a pediatric emergency medicine
specialist, chief of the section of clinical toxicology and director of the
Poison Control Center at The Children's Mercy Hospital in
Kansas City, Missouri. ''It looks like a big syringe without the needle. You
stick it against the skin and it works by creating a vacuum that
sucks out the venom liquid. If you spend a lot of time outdoors, it's the
thing to have.'' It can also be used for spider bites or any venomous
insect bite or sting, he points out.