Health on the fells: the footnotes
Safety
Five things walkers ask about their health on the fells, one screen each, and each answered on the page that holds the evidence. First, the line this site draws.
This site holds information, not advice, and it will not pretend otherwise. Nothing here diagnoses anything, and nothing here restates the first-aid guide: each note below points to the page that holds the evidence and its sources.
On the hill, a life-threatening emergency is 999, ask for Police, then Mountain Rescue; the first-aid guide says how, and what to say.
Off the hill, anything that has not settled - a rash spreading from a tick bite, heat illness that rest, shade and water do not fix, a bite or sting that swells beyond where it happened - is a matter for your GP or NHS 111. A website is the wrong place to be looking at that point, this one included.
Ticks and Lyme disease
Ticks wait in long grass, bracken and woodland edge, and the season peaks in summer. Trousers tucked in, a check of skin and clothing at the end of the day, and a tick tool in the kit are the whole of the prevention a walker controls. A rash spreading from a bite, or feeling ill in the weeks after one, is a conversation with a GP, not with a website.
Read: Ticks and Lyme disease on Summer on the Fells, with the source; the kit list on the first-aid guide.
Heat, and drinking too much
Heat exhaustion and heatstroke are two different things, and the line between them is the one that decides whether you rest in the shade or call for help. Less known is the way to make yourself ill by drinking more than you lose over a long hot day. Both are set out, with the medical sources, on the summer report.
Read: Heat: the two stages and the thirty-minute rule; Drinking too much: exercise-associated hyponatraemia.
Midges
Not dangerous, just miserable: still, damp, sheltered valley heads at dusk in a windless week. There is no Lake District midge forecast, and this site will not invent one; the conditions that produce them are as precise as anyone can honestly be.
Drinking from a beck
Some Lakeland becks carry metals from old mines that no filter removes, and the National Park's advice is not to drink from natural sources. Which becks, why the gear cannot fix it, and what the data says are on the water essay.
Read: Can you drink the water in the Lake District?; the beck-by-beck data.
Adders
Britain's only venomous snake, and it wants nothing to do with you: bites happen when one is trodden on or picked up, and dogs are bitten more often than people. A bite is treated as an emergency; the summer report says what that means on a fell.
The long reads: First aid on the fell, Summer on the Fells, Can you drink the water?. This page carries no figure of its own by design; every number lives beside its source on those pages.