mosquito bites

My daughter gets bitten at night, poor girl. The thing which worries me most are the huge red whelts she gets afterwards. They can stay for 2 or 3 days.... and they hurt.


Anyone have a solution?

At night so do you mean while she's sleeping?



Have your home fumigated?? But then those chemicals they use are pretty toxic, too.


Keep the temperature low with airconditioning as I know mosquitoes don't like it. Make sure you have no stagnant water in your plant pots that would attract mozzies and try some kid friendly repellant. The best though are the ones with DEET, but again, they are toxic as well. For the bites, try Anthisan cream from Watson's or Mannings. They work for my kids. My daughter gets those huge welts sometimes, too, and they completely disappear with the anthisan after a couple of days. Good luck.

this sound crazy - but bananas. Make sure she eats one a day. Something in it is a rather "natural" based repellent. also - try finding a mosquito net to put around her bed. They can be decently effective.


Finally, in Seoul (i'm sure you can find it in HK) they have the most effective oil based mosquito repellents. You plug it in and pour some of this liquid in it - and bam - no mosquito bites. i'm wondering if Japan Home center has something similar.


How old is your daughter? I always liked putting chinese tiger balm on my bites - but it can be dangerous if she's young and rubs her eyes.

hortons - Just a thought - depending on the age of your little girl it is possible that she is being bitten during the day (especially if she plays around those children's play areas with the rubber tiles or where there is drainage and vegetation) by this teeny tiny little insects that when you catch them look just like a head and almost no body - size of a pin head or smaller. The bites do not come up until several hours later, are big and often get blisters on the top, several small ones that sometimes look like one big one they continue to grow over the next day or so, itch like hell... and sometimes because the blister breaks down from scratching or swelling they get a sore and leave a scar. I am very allergic to them and so are many kids I have met. I was advised to take Clarytyne, use Eurax Cream (anti itch that is very effective - available over the counter at Matildas, most hospital or pharmacies that dispense which have the Rx sign outside) and also some mild steroid cream for the scarring. I ended up at Matilda with fourteen bites and legs like the elephant man when I first arrived here in HK as I would stand on those play mats to hold my kids on the monkey bars... especially I get the bites on the bottoms of my legs as they tend to jump up from the ground. I can recognise when they are around now, but they don't leave that little white bump like mosquito bites do. I have asked a couple of doctors and countless people if they could name them for me and no luck, similar to sandfly bites but they aren't.

ness, I think those are "no-see-ums" (because you hardly can see them at all!). I find that I always get bitten on the same spots, around my wrist and around my ankles/feet. I was told by a colleague that they are attracted by the pulse and could 'smell' the blood. You're right about the rubber playmats on the playground. I remember getting bitten very badly when I took my son to the kiddy playground at Ocean Park! Anyway, check out these links for further info:


http://pelotes.jea.com/AnimalFact/Arthropod/NOSEEUM.htm


http://camping.about.com/od/glossaryofcampingterms/g/gt0057.htm

Assuming it's mosquitoes, how are they getting in the house?!! Where I used to live in USA, mosquitoes sometimes were thick as clouds, and we had to be very vigilant to make sure they didn't get in the house. (It would not be unusual to have 50 bites on unprotected skin from just a few minutes being outside.) Here are a few tips I learned from growing up in such an environment: make sure people get in and out of house quickly, teach children never to leave door open (don't hold the door open for the next person who is lagging behind). Double check all screens and windows for leaks where a mozzie could get in (the tiniest of holes!), either close bathroom vents or make sure the exhaust fan is running 24 / 7. Burn a citronella candle or mosquito coil just outside your door, to keep them away from the entrance as you go in and out. Pour boiling water or some sort of bleach product down bathroom drains occasionally to make sure none are hiding out down in the drains. As ban said, go all around your interior and exterior building and make sure there is no stagnant water anywhere. My neighbor had a terrible mozzie problem and I could immediately see it was her fountain, easily fixed by putting some chlorine bleach in the water! Mosquitoes live most of their lives in and around plant leaves, and male mosquitoes suck on plant juice. If you have foliage growing outside, fumigate it occasionally (can buy special foggers for that purpose). Chinese stores sell indoor "bug zappers" that attract bugs and fry them with electricity (I'd be concerned about little fingers though). At night, inspect your child's room thoroughly for the tiny things before turning the light off. Make a game of hunting them out and smashing them between your hands! Mosquitoes seem to sleep in dark cubby holes during the day, but at night they seem to follow the lights to the last room in the house that has the light on, so I try to make that the bathroom and then shut the door before I go to sleep, theoretically to lock them in the bathroom I guess. I don't like using deet but it's better than the bites, and I have read many times that it's not toxic (it's what my parents used when I was a kid, and I've certainly had heavy lifetime exposure!). For children, I purchase two kinds of mosquito repellant (which must contain deet to be most effective). One is the spray kind, that I only spray on the outside of clothing. The second is a rub-on stick that I put in spots on exposed skin such as cheeks, hands, feet etc. My goal is to make my child stink to the mosquito while having as little as possible on their skin. But recently at an outdoor restaurant I was being bitten by a mosquito and the restaurant owner gave me a bit of Chinese oil to dab on my ankles to repel the mosquito. I don't know what it was, but it was clear and smelled like white flower oil. Then there is also the vitamin B trick -- try to make yourself smell less sexy to the mosquito by eating vitamin B (and banana too as said above). There's a lot of vitamin B in nutritional yeast, which you can add a tsp of to some apple juice daily. My grandma also believes in putting a tsp of vinegar in a glass of water and drinking that daily (but I wouldnt' inflict this on a kid). The folk wisdom is that vinegar in the water helped the colonial Europeans avoid malaria in the swampy areas near my home in the USA. As far as dealing with bites, a skin cream with antihistamine is good (mentioned above). There's a product in the USA called caladryl that has calamine and benadryl that is particularly good, don't know if they have that here. A hydrocortisone cream will also help inflammation (itching). Finally, here's another tip given to me by a pediatrician friend. Immediately after you get the bite, a dab of anything with a low PH -- chlorine bleach for instance, will help the itch. Don't know why that works. And one more trick that I don't know why it works. If you can stand not to touch the mosquito bite for 20 minutes immediately after it happens, it will stop itching and go away. Don't know why that works, either. But if the bites do get red and inflamed (infected) use an antiseptic cream! :-) Oh, and regarding ness's answer. Where I live we call those insects "No See Ums". They are small enough to come right through screens! The same things that repel mosquitoes repel them, too. Now that's everything I know!

I agree about the Caladryl cream. You can get it from some Mannings stores. I saw it recently in Prince Building and The Peak (100 Peak Road, where Highgate House School is). Look for a small rectangular pink and white box. It may not be in the mosquito bites cream section so look in other sections. The calamine brings down the swelling at once and the camphor stops the itching. Works well with my 2 year old. Just be careful when applying it to hands and face. I usually do so when she's sleeping to avoid getting it in her eyes.

Kwis - thanks for the link to the no-see-ums,I laughed out loud that they actually call them that on the website! They are definitely what I get bitten by and most of the playareas that I have been bitten were beside a gully or hill of thick vegetation so that makes sense as well - although I think they are under those mats and the pounding of tiny feet makes them jump out. I did actually see them swarming at the peak school playground the other saturday morning - first time ever - as described in the website.