Dr. Maura Finn

The risk of disease is if there has been sustained feeding.

So really not until 24, 48 hours of attachment.

But people do get freaked out.

They find them, they get freaked out.

And if you are and you're worried at all, contact your doctor because we will give you the right advice then.

Really, there isn't an awful lot of point here unless you want to be certain it is a tick for one thing.

But, you know, they're not tested.

We don't have a facility to test them here.

And if you have a tick, what we do is we treat you symptomatically.

If you've had exposure, you've been in an area, even if you're not certain that you have had

a tick bite that you've seen, it may have fallen off before you realised it.

If you have a certain kind of rash or you have symptoms that are like a flu like symptoms or a fever within a certain number of days, we would treat you empirically.

So we would actually give you antibiotic cover.

just in case you are exposed to Lyme disease.

But only 5% of tick bites will actually carry Lyme disease.

So it's important not to freak people out as well as being informed, you know.

It can.

Well, I think they kind of estimate about 400 people in Ireland would be affected every year.

So that's quite a lot, really.

Now, the majority of those will have very minor symptoms.