Poison Ivy in November!!

[screwtop]

I was scouting a large stand of pines this past weekend in preparation for the firearms season, which starts Satuarday. I could not hunt this area in the early archery season due to the plethora of Poison Ivy, but after a couple of frosts in November, all the leaves were gone. I figured it would be safe to go in there.
I figured wrong :banghead

Sooo, I've got a swolen, encrusted nose, and the crud is making its way to the areas around my eyes. I know from experience that there's only one place worse that your face to have this crap. I'm off to the immediate care for a prednizone perscription, which will hopefully clear it up fast.

[wmubrown]

Sooo, I've got a swolen, encrusted nose, and the crud is making its way to the areas around my eyes. I know from experience that there's only one place worse that your face to have this crap. I'm off to the immediate care for a prednizone perscription, which will hopefully clear it up fast.

Bummer... hope that prednizone works! There is a little patch (or was? not sure) out in a patch of scrub between I and my neighbors. I stay away from it all the time. I'd like to tear up that whole patch and clear it out. I hear the oil poison ivy leaves on skin and clothes cannot be washed out and has to be burned?

[Belquar]

That stuff will get you dead or alive. The oil is urushiol. Nasty stuff. Also found in mango skin and cashew shells.

I am highly allergic. I hate that crap. I can eat mango and cashews. Just can't fool around with the outsides. I have not noticed a reaction with ripe mango only green ones. SUCKS.

Get better soon.

[sachiwilson]

You can thank global warming. Just think - poison ivy all year 'round! :brad :wave

[screwtop]

You can thank global warming. Just think - poison ivy all year 'round! :brad :wave

Well, If ya think so, OK, but I don't. Maybe I should go back to getting the shots??

[sfdave]

Poison Oak around here, just as active out of leaf as in.

I get it all the time which is a bummer since I'm in the tree business../

[Fritzc]

Poison Ivy is a deciduous plant losing its leaves in the fall. It is not dead! If you see a woody vine growing up a tree trunk with many branching rootlike structures, that is Poison Ivy. It may also grow like low shrubbery. Poison Sumac is a shrub that lives in marshy areas not normally visited by people unless hunting or fishing. Poison Oak and Poison Ivy are the same thing. Leaflets three, Leave it be!
The oil causing the allergic reaction is in the leaves as well as the bark and if either is touched, you got it. I am more susceptible in the summer when I'm hot and sweaty and my skin pores are opened up. Especially bad is if burning and the oil is vaporized thusly may be inhaled. That is really bad news. Some people think they are immune but repeated exposure has proven to increase risk. A buddy of mine got it really bad as he liked to show off by rubbing it on his skin and finally reached the sensitive stage.:banghead :scratch:thumb

[amiles]

Fels Naptha bar soap is highly thought of by many as a way to remove the evil oils before they can do their worst harm. I use it at the end of the day when I suspect exposure. It's made by the Dial Corporation.

Fels Naptha is an old time product (100 years old according to the label) first used for washing clothes with a washboard or being shaved off with a knife for the old wringer machines. It has no naptha or petroleum products in it. It's a pretty harsh soap, but I suspect that it's success is due to it's harshness. In these parts it can be found at Kroger Grocery stores (usually with some serious hunting in the laundry department)

It works pretty darn good on pre-treating stained clothes as well. Your Grandma most likely swore by it.

[Bob_M]

You may want to get a doctor to give you shot as well. I got it (poison oak actually) in January one time, bashing through a leafless thicket, got to the top of the rock pile and saw the last remaining leaf on the shrub. To my self I said "you are f____d now" :banghead . I swole up to where I looked like the Michelen Man. The doc gave me a shot of some steroid and some pills and it finally went away.

Message: I feel your pain (itch)

One other thing. Wash your hands before and after you use the bathroom.

[KGT1200]

I was scouting a large stand of pines this past weekend in preparation for the firearms season, which starts Satuarday. I could not hunt this area in the early archery season due to the plethora of Poison Ivy, but after a couple of frosts in November, all the leaves were gone. I figured it would be safe to go in there.
I figured wrong :banghead

Sooo, I've got a swolen, encrusted nose, and the crud is making its way to the areas around my eyes. I know from experience that there's only one place worse that your face to have this crap. I'm off to the immediate care for a prednizone perscription, which will hopefully clear it up fast.


Beware, beware of predizone, it really screwed with my whole being physical and mental. I felt depressed, sort of loopy, dizzy. The symptoms lasted for weeks after. Don't go off of it all at once, it's used alot to control the alziemers/demintia set of the nursing homes...powerful mind drug as well as a hystamine inhibitor.

I has a bad case of the hives, took prednizone and after it all, I would of suffered though hives or looked closer at alternatves instead of the treatment.

Sorry about the ivy; oatmeal baths and calimine lotion!


Red

[jdmetzger]

Beware, beware of predizone, it really screwed with my whole being physical and mental. I felt depressed, sort of loopy, dizzy. The symptoms lasted for weeks after. Don't go off of it all at once, it's used alot to control the alziemers/demintia set of the nursing homes...powerful mind drug as well as a hystamine inhibitor.

I has a bad case of the hives, took prednizone and after it all, I would of suffered though hives or looked closer at alternatves instead of the treatment.

Sorry about the ivy; oatmeal baths and calimine lotion!


Red

Steroids can be bad stuff. Taking a prednisone "burst pack" doesn't have a huge negative affect on me... but back when I would go into the emergency room with asthma problem, the injections of steroids would give me "roid rage". Aside from feeling overall horrible I would be pretty moody for days after. Ugh. They're nasty, but sometimes a necessary evil.

[130253]

I am one of those individuals who can't get within 10 feet of poison ivy without getting it and have had it from head to toe and all points in between, so I am quite aware of my surrounding when out in the field. But one time, a couple of years ago while hunting from one of our tree stands, I broke off a piece of a vine growing up the side of the tree to use as a "toothpick" to clear a piece of meat from a ham sandwich from a gap between two teeth. I chewed on that "toothpick" for some time without thinking about the fact that it was a vine growing up the side of a tree on the edge of the woods.:scratch About three days later I realized what I had done:banghead .............I fell your itch!

[screwtop]

Fels Naptha bar soap is highly thought of by many as a way to remove the evil oils before they can do their worst harm. I use it at the end of the day when I suspect exposure. It's made by the Dial Corporation.

Fels Naptha is an old time product (100 years old according to the label) first used for washing clothes with a washboard or being shaved off with a knife for the old wringer machines. It has no naptha or petroleum products in it. It's a pretty harsh soap, but I suspect that it's success is due to it's harshness. In these parts it can be found at Kroger Grocery stores (usually with some serious hunting in the laundry department)

It works pretty darn good on pre-treating stained clothes as well. Your Grandma most likely swore by it.

I'm familiar with the Fels Naptha and still remember the odor of the stuff from when I had to bathe with it as a kid. I also used to get shots for poison ivy as a preventative measure as a kid. With regard to prednisone, I usually don't have any issues with the "dose pack" and am happy to say at this writing, that it's working quite well.

Thanks for the comments, all

[northoak]

Sorry to hear of your problem Screwtop. I've heard stories of people getting poison ivy in the dead of winter (up here, it really is the DEAD of winter in January! :D ) just by walking through the bush.

We have a company up here (Lee Valley) that sells a product that is supposed to protect your hands (or whatever you rub it on! ;) ) from, among other things, poison ivy/oak. They do sell in the U.S. of A. and, according to Lee Valley, it's made there! I can say it works from experience. Here's a link:

http://www.leevalley.com/garden/page.aspx?c=2&cat=2,42551&p=10256

Of course Screwtop, it's too late for you now :(, but this may help in the future.

Happy Thanksgiving to all in America. Keep the rubber side down!

Jack

[K1150RT]

I work for a utility and got into the Ivy somewhere this summer also. Don't know where, but ended up taking a pack of predisone too. After I got the medicine I went past work and picked up some Zanfel,this stuff works great on the itch. You're supposed to use it right away but even worked good a day or so after the exposure. Stopped the itch almost immediately. It is kind of pricey though, I think around $40 a tube, but well worth it. Available at most drug stores I think. If the itch is still there give it a try. Here's their homepage http://www.zanfel.com

[Holly]

An outdoor experiment mimicking the carbon dioxide rise predicted for this century found that poison ivy vines grew more than twice as much per year as they did in unaltered air, says Jacqueline E. Mohan, now of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. That growth streak is nearly five times the increase reported for some tree species in other analyses.

More bad news: The jolt of carbon dioxide also boosted the most-toxic forms of poison ivy's rash-raising oil, Mohan and her colleagues report in the June 13 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"It's a sobering example that rising carbon dioxide can favor pests and weeds, those plants we'd least like to see succeed," comments climate-change ecologist Bruce Hungate of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.

People burning fossil fuels release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. As the atmosphere gains carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases, it traps more of the sun's heat.

Biologists have wondered whether this carbon boost might work as aerial fertilizer for plants. Earlier lab experiments found plants growing exuberantly with extra carbon dioxide, but these tests provided abundant water and nutrients.

For more-realistic tests, researchers have set up treetop-high pipes that blow either regular air or extra carbon dioxide over landscape patches in various ecosystems around the world. For 6 years, Mohan and her colleagues monitored poison ivy and the other plants growing within circles of such pipes in a pine forest monitored by researchers of Duke University in Durham, N.C.

The poison ivy vines thrived with about 50 percent extra carbon dioxide, showing extra photosynthesis and more-efficient water use.

These vines produced the same concentration of the toxic oil urushiol as the plain-air vines did. However, for the poison ivy receiving extra carbon dioxide, about 20 percent of the oil was in chemically unsaturated forms, whereas the plain-air ivy produced 15 percent unsaturated urushiol. The unsaturated forms are more likely to provoke painful skin reactions in people.

Other studies have suggested that vines may be big winners in a high–carbon dioxide future, says Mohan. Vines don't spend much of their carbon harvest on trunks or other supports, so the carbon windfall can go directly into new leaves, which collect yet more carbon and sunlight.

An increased abundance of vines, which can choke out trees, could change forest dynamics, Mohan says.

Forest honeysuckle vines increase their growth in air that's high in carbon dioxide, says Rich Norby, who directs a pipe-circle experiment at Oak Ridge (Tenn.) National Laboratory. However, he predicts that even poison ivy's gangbuster growth will eventually hit some limit, such as available sunlight.

The pipe-circle experiments can't mimic all the factors influencing plants in real forests. Mohan protected her experimental poison ivy plants from white-tailed deer and other browsing animals, notes plant physiologist Hendrik Poorter of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Yet plants growing in abundant carbon dioxide typically have low protein content, so Poorter speculates that animals might actually eat more of them to get adequate nutrition.

Bigger, more-toxic poison ivy is a serious concern, says Paul Beggs of Macquarie University in Australia. It's another factor to add to his tally of the extra misery that climate change might bring to people with allergies. For example, certain pollen counts are likely to go up, so allergy seasons could drag on longer, he says.

Mohan had never developed a rash from poison ivy before she started the study. "I get it now," she says.
Copyright: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060603/fob1.asp

[Mar]

Don't burn poison ivy, either. The smoke will give you the rash, as will leaves and bare vines.

[lancew]

I suffer badly from it- be warned that the vines and roots will get you too. Only got a prednisone shot once- I had it in my eyes and figured it was necessary.

There's an herb here in Virginia called Jewelweed that works well to relieve the itch and shrink the blisters. My wife's aunt can spot it, and she makes a tea that she freezes into ice cubes. Beats all the other remedies combined- if you can find it in your area (or in your local natural foods store) I highly recommend it.

[darcym]

I got a little rash on my lower legs right now. Last Sunday our local club had a road clean up, and I wore shorts under my riding pants knowing it would be warm along the road. It's been cold at nights here, so I know it's been cold out by the lake where we were cleaning up. I saw some suspect bushes that I kept distance from, but there were some bare (no leaves) foliage too, I suspect that I rubbed up against them not knowing that they were poison oak. So three days later I start seeing the rash.

Usually if I know I've been in it (and it gets me from about 10 feet away too, it seems!) I use a product called Tecnu to wash up in to remove the oils. http://www.tecnuextreme.com/index.htm

It works really well. Sadly, I didn't even think I'd been in it, so I didn't use the Tecnu. I'll suffer thru it this time, fortunately it's not a bad case.

[TerryClark]

I work for a State Agency. Every year we have a couple of lady flaggers on construction sites that come up with poison ivy in a very private place after relieving themselves in the woods. They get worker's comp. I actually feel sorry for them.

[130253]

I suffer badly from it- be warned that the vines and roots will get you too. Only got a prednisone shot once- I had it in my eyes and figured it was necessary.

There's an herb here in Virginia called Jewelweed that works well to relieve the itch and shrink the blisters. My wife's aunt can spot it, and she makes a tea that she freezes into ice cubes. Beats all the other remedies combined- if you can find it in your area (or in your local natural foods store) I highly recommend it.

...can be found growing right around were poision ivy grows, at least in this part of the world. So you must pick it before frost. You can take the fresh leaves and rub them right on the rash, or as lancew suggest making a tea and freezing it in ice cube trays to rub it on areas affected with poision ivy, and yes it does work quite well. I too highly recommend it:thumb