The Good Old DOG FLEA
Dog Flea Humans

 The Usual Dog Flea Human Suspects

The usual suspects are dog fleas and cat fleas. If you have age and experience around animals, you don't have to be an expert to know that there is a difference in fleas. Personally, I prefer dog fleas. They seem to be a bit more tame than cat fleas, but this is just my surmise. Either way, when Fluffy isn't around, and it's supper time, any old human will do. If lunch happens to be 20 year old Jeff, with no known allergies, a dog flea human chomp isn't a big deal. But if it's, Doris the 6 month old, or Grampa Ray, the geriatric, then again, it may well become one, especially if there is more than one feeding dog flea around.

Dog flea human type fleas look a great deal like the third mutation of Alien. They have no wings, and their bodies are encased in natural armor. Smush them with all your strength between your fingers, and they just laugh. A flea laugh isn't funny. They just rah back and sip on a blood milk shake.

Dog flea human fleas go through four stages. They are cute when they are eggs, but the fun and games soon end as they proceed to full Alien. The second stage is larvae, the third, pupae, and the forth, ALIEN.

The cute little flea egg babies soon hatch into larvae, which looks like tender little maggots. Wiggling around on Fluffy, or in your carpet, they look for their first meal. (You're going to love this...) They don't lop up blood at this stage. No. They'll content themselves with whatever is handy, a fleckle of skin, dandruff, a bit of underdone microscopic potato....But what they really relish is adult flea poop. Adult flea poop contains dried blood, by the way.... Either Fluffy's blood, or...yours.

So says government experts paid well with your tax money to know these things, the fleas you see on Fluffy, or in Fluffy's bath water are only the tip of the household environment iceberg. The rest of your dog flea human guests are in their various production stages of eggs, larvae, and cocoons. We're talking that for every adult flea in your domicile, there are 9 more dog flea human critters working on becoming adult fleas.

In olden days, and I mean real olden days, dog flea human fleas were responsible for great doses of human plague. It is perfectly reasonable to conclude they the humble blood sucking parasite pest Alien flea changed the course of human events in massive ways. Death magnified by death and human suffering was the rule when fleas abounded on the earth. That's the bad news.

The good news is that even though the ugly little pests are great natural puddles of disease, humans are basically immune to common diseases of the flea like puking up their blood breakfast, etc. You see, for fleas to become active carriers of human disease, there needs to first exist a source of that disease, and it must be able to survive in the flea gut. Thankfully, currently, there isn't anything like that around, so the worst thing you're apt to suffer from a dog flea human bite is an irritating sore. Which is bad enough!

A Dog Flea Human Flea Bit Me! How May I Be Saved?

Fear not. Unless you are unusual, your dog flea human bite symptoms, if any, should subside in a couple of days with nothing more than an itch. The itch, like most other insect bites sometimes causes a "scratch response." Herein lies the problem. If someone is a really aggressive scratcher, or is loopy, damage to the flea bite area may occur that is well beyond the microscopic bite, or somewhat larger bump or halo rash. Symptoms beyond this are rare, but, just as with other insect bites, every so often, a human comes along that is especially affected. If the bitten area swells, or the damage persists, common sense should be the guide of when and if to see a doctor. Allergies are unpredictable things. All of us are only one bite of anything away from a really bad reaction. There is no predicting it, and the only prevention is in making sure we don't get get bit in the first place.

If you are bitten by a flea, unless you see something out of the ordinary in the bite area, or have an allergic reaction of any kind, then...don't worry about it. Your body knows when it's time to go to the doctor. Flea bites happen. Always have, always will. Fleas will be around to infest the next dominant species on the Earf, long after man is but a dinosaur dream. Fleas laugh at epochs and species declines, Manhattan sized meteors and such. To them, everything else that moves is but animated celery stalks...and fleas love animated celery stalks.