The sun is out here in the Netherlands – we are enjoying some beautiful warm weather, even over a bank holiday weekend! And with the sun and spending more time outside comes warnings of ticks. These are small insects that live in grasslands and can bite you. While the bite itself isn’t a huge issue, it can be infected as ticks pass on diseases such as encephalitis and Lyme disease. Both the preschool and the school here have reminded us numerous times that we should check for ticks after every trip outside. Which is curious to me, as it isn’t something that I was aware of needing to do in the UK. And yet the rates of infections for tick borne diseases are similar in the Netherlands and the south east of the UK (where we used to live).

I know of a few people here who have been bitten by them, so it is a danger. The difficulty is removing the tick carefully enough, and quickly enough. Fortunately we haven’t had a bite ourselves though. But we do need to keep aware of the possible issue and check ourselves more frequently.

So, if anyone hasn’t heard about ticks you can read further on stop the tick – this is the British site, but they have versions for a number of different countries including the Netherlands.