From Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia.
- For
other uses, see
Bite (disambiguation).
A bite is a
wound received from the
mouth (and in particular, the
teeth) of an
animal. Animals may bite in
self-defense, or in an attempt to
predate food. Other bite attacks
may be apparently unprovoked.
Bite wounds raise a number of
medical concerns for the
physician or
first aider including:
Examples
-
Flea bites are responsible
for the transmission of
bubonic plague.
-
Mosquito bites are
responsible for the transmission
of
malaria.
- The bites of various animals
may transmit
rabies.
- The most frequent animal
implicated in bite attacks that
require medical treatment is
Homo sapiens. Prior to
antibiotics, serious human bites
to the hand often resulted in
amputation of a finger (in about
20% of cases).
Treatment
Bite wounds are washed, ideally
with povidone iodine soap. They
are loosely bandaged, and are not
sutured due to risk of infection.
Animal bites by carnivores
other than rodents are considered
possible cases of rabies. The
animal is caught alive or dead
with its head preserved, so the
head can later be analyzed to
detect the disease. Signs of
Rabies include foaming mouth,
self-mutilation, growling, jerky
behavior, and red eyes. If the
animal lives for ten days and does
not develop rabies, then it is
probable that no infection has
occurred.
If the animal is gone,
prophylactic Rabies treatment is
recommended in most places.
Certain places, such as Hawaii,
are known not to have native
rabies. Treatment is generally
available in North America,
Britain and the Northern European
states.
Many
snake-bites, even by poisonous
snakes, are not envenomated,
and these can be treated as animal
bites.
Croatilid (rattlesnake
and pit-viper) venoms cause the
bitten area to turn green or
purple. The venom of
elapsids (coral and many other
non-U.S. snakes) causes swollen
lymph nodes. If symptoms
appear, they are treated by
compressing and cooling the bite
(some say the bite should not be
cooled, see
the FDA's site). If a victim
is unable to reach medical care
within 30 minutes, a bandage,
wrapped two to four inches above
the bite, may help slow the spread
of venom. The bandage should not
cut off blood flow from a vein or
artery. A good rule of thumb is to
make the band loose enough that a
finger can slip under it (American
Red Cross, FDA/Office of Public
Affairs). If available,
antivenin should be
administered.
Spider and snake bites are
treated in the same manner as
snake-bites. The
black widow spider and some
scorpions are dangerous mostly
to small children and elderly
adults. Only the
Sydney funnel-web spider of
Australia is frequently
dangerous to adults, and it
resides only within 100 miles of
Sydney Australia. Antivenins
are available in the U.S. for
black widow spiders and the
dangerous scorpions native to the
U.S.
