08/04/2026
🌟BITE Week! 🦈➡️ 🦟
Small Bites Can Become Big Problems
😎The Dog Days are the hottest stretch of summer and the season of stingers, standing water, and tailgates. Mosquitoes account for most insect bites worldwide, and scratching a bite open is a recognized route to secondary bacterial infection (StatPearls, 2026). That is how an itchy annoyance becomes cellulitis, which drives roughly 650,000 United States hospital admissions a year (Raff & Kroshinsky, 2016). Crush injuries from trailers, mowers, and yard equipment are an approved indication for hyperbaric oxygen, where a randomized trial showed markedly higher complete healing with HBOT (Bouachour et al., 1996).
⚠️Recognize Redness ⚠️
Spreading past the bite, fever, drainage, or pain out of proportion is escalation, not healing. Bite reactions build over hours; cellulitis builds over days.
✅️Refer Fast ✅️
Scratched-open bites that will not close, and crush injuries, go to advanced wound care early.