How To Get Rid of Chiggers

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by Adobestock/encierro

It’s summer again, the season when chiggers make cowards of us all. Wouldn’t it be great to skip through fields of wildflowers and roll around in cool grass like the people in allergy medicine commercials do? Anyone that reckless either doesn’t get out much or is too young to know better. Call the rest of us “once bitten, twice shy” because meadows and lush grass often are guarded by chiggers — tiny “red bugs” that leave small and terribly itchy wounds on human hosts in the most delicate and unmentionable places.

Ounce for ounce, the almost-microscopic chigger may cause more irritation than any other critter. Yet contrary to popular belief, chiggers don’t suck blood or burrow under the skin. They eat skin cells, which they dissolve with digestive enzymes. The human immune system defends bitten areas by forming a hard wall of cells, called a stylostome. Conveniently for the chigger, these stylostomes double as strawlike feeding tubes. And there’s the rub — and the scratch — it’s your own immune system’s response that causes the intense itching.

Where Do Chiggers Live?

Chiggers are not true insects — they actually are immature mites — though they do scamper around on six legs in their troublesome larval stage. Like their parasitic tick cousins, chigger larvae attach themselves to hosts to feed by inserting minute mouthparts into skin, usually at hair follicles. Chiggers are found worldwide. In the United States, they are most common in the Southeast and Midwest because they thrive in humid weather amid thick vegetation.

  • Updated on May 24, 2023
  • Originally Published on Jun 1, 2005
Tagged with: Bug Bites, natural bug bite remedies
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