Our poison ivy season seems to be shaping up to be a bad one! The combination of the warmer weather and damp late winter and early spring seem to have turned the outdoors green very quickly. This has apparently helped the poison ivy grow and we have seen quite a few cases in the office.
The best treatment with any poisonous plant rash is PREVENTION. It can be helpful to Google search images of "poison ivy" if your child is prone to the rash to help try and avoid the plant. If you think you did get exposed, take a warm soapy shower or bath as soon as you can to wash the oil from the plant off your skin.
A couple points: 1. You CANNOT tell which of the poisonous plants that caused the rash by looking at the rash -- they all cause the same rashy issues. 2. There is a lot of poison ivy (80% of the rashes we see) and poison oak (about 15% of the rashes we see) in Ohio, but almost no poison sumac -- that is a more Southern plant.
Please see our website handout about treatment and prevention here.
No comments:
Post a Comment