Fake News: Undetectable Tick That Burrows Under Your Skin
According to Snopes.com “In early May 2017, a viral post started circulating on Facebook, warning viewers that there was a new type of tick for which to be on the lookout.”
Introduction
This is a scary thing to many people. After all, who likes having a tick attached to them? Along with the tick comes the chance of diseases being spread into your body. If you can not see the tick then how are you supposed to be able to get it out and prevent that particular possibility? This post had quickly circulated the internet in order to share the WARNING that a new tick could bury its self underneath the skin undetected. The post had been shared over 50,000 times on the internet. Furthermore, having looked at the post and with a little research you quickly find out that this post is a fake and was quickly spread to many people falsely.
Research Findings
While we are no longer able to view the original post, due to it being taken down or made private from the public eye. I was still able to find a few images on google images, as well as a few websites like one called Snopes.com from which I was able to find information about the original post. After reading this it makes you wonder if it is reliable. Many people (including myself sometimes) get wrapped up in the fact that it is a very serious warning if you know how dangerous the object of the warning is about and don’t check the facts. For this particular post it is the scare of a tick and the possibility of diseases that come with it. But if you look at this closely and read it through again you find that there is no mention of a source that it came from. Not one news site, station, or even a doctors cautioning is mentioned. We only have what the person who uploaded the post wrote.
In addition to reading it, you can look into the pictures that were with the original post. The picture that is attached to the post has a tick that has attached its self to its host.The source of that photo came from a story that was from St. George News which is based in Utah. That story had nothing to do with a new and rare tick, instead it’s coming from a story about a Grand Canyon visitor that had contracted tick-borne relapsing fever. In the second image (posted above) that was attached to the original post appears to be a tick that has wriggled its way into the skin of the person in the photo. According to snopes where the image was found “it has been on the Internet since 2008. It was originally posted on a message board for the web site SportFishWorld.com. The image was taken by a man who was bitten by a tick (but it simply bit him, and did not burrow beneath his skin). He documented the healing process”.
The following is a video from YouTube; originally a PBS Digital Studio work, it explains how a tick actually digs into our skin: only the mouth and prongs penetrate our skin, not the entire body.
Snopes.com was able to track down the person who had posted the warning on Facebook. “The person who created the post, Mychael Gallagher, told us the post is fake. He created it as an experiment with his two daughters, aged 8 and 11 years, to demonstrate how quickly false information can spread on social media.” After looking further into how a tick penetrates the skin I found this video above which gives you the demonstration of what a tick does from beginning to end. Continuing on from that to researching how a tick actually lives its life and what it has to do to survive you find that only the mouth penetrates the skin. According to Health.Harvard.edu, “Ticks are tiny, biting arachnids that feed on the blood of warm-blooded animals, including humans. They burrow painlessly into the skin with their feeding parts, bite, draw blood and eventually drop off when they become engorged with blood. Only the feeding parts are inserted into the skin. The body, which is dark in color and ranges from the size of a poppy seed to a pencil eraser, remains visible on the skin surface or scalp.”
Thus the proof leads to the overall post being false. Proving the point that Mychael Gallagher was trying to make to his daughters that news true or flase can travel by social media quickly. So check out what you are reading before sharing it with others to prevent the possibility of false news being spread.
