Lyme disease carrying ticks aren’t in Wellington County yet but that will likely change, according to local health officials.
“We’re doing surveillance,” explained Dr. Nicola Mercer, medical officer of health and CEO of Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health.
“Will we have this disease in the future? I think the answer’s going to be yes. I mean we will have it.
“Right now it doesn’t look like we would be … in an at-risk or endemic area. I can’t speak for five years from now or 10 years from now. … That’s why we’re doing the research, because I think we’re expecting it.”
At the June 1 public health board meeting Mercer explained the health unit is doing proactive research to map which ticks are in the area.
“We do something called tick dragging,” Mercer said, which involves public health workers dragging local areas in search for blacklegged ticks, also known as deer ticks, that could carry Lyme disease.
They use a one metre square of white flannel fabric in potential tick habitats in hope a tick will latch on. None were found last summer – and as of June 1 none had been found this year either.
“We will continue to look and we’re going to continue to monitor and there’s areas that are being dragged and this is an ongoing research project,” Mercer said. “So what we think we will see eventually is … the migration of ticks into Wellington, Dufferin, Guelph – most likely starting more southern as they move northward and we’ll be able to see and document the arrival of the specific ticks that carry Lyme disease, which is the Borrelia burgdorferi organism.”
Lyme disease was first diagnosed in Lyme, Connecticut but hasn’t been found in Canada much because the disease carrying tick doesn’t naturally live north of the border.
“Ticks are hitchhikers and they jump onto birds … then guess what?” Mercer said. “When they migrate up to Canada those ticks drop off, usually in the first place the bird lands … most likely … just when it finishes crossing Lake Erie or Lake Ontario and that’s where we have all our colonies.”
Even so, when a patient or doctor discovers a tick they are encouraged by public health officials to keep it intact and in a jar.
“Just bring it to the health unit and we’ll identify it and if it was a blacklegged tick then we would send it off to be tested for the organism that causes Lyme disease,” Mercer said, adding it’s rare the diagnosis would be positive.
“But it really informs treatment, as well to say to a patient ‘yes you had the right tick but no that tick was not infected’ is very reassuring for the people,” she said.
“Now we also have to recognize that not everybody actually sees the tick or is aware that they (have) tick bites.”
Anyone who’s going to be outside is encouraged to check themselves and their children when they head inside. The blacklegged tick must be feeding for at least 24 hours before it transmits Lyme disease. However, in Wellington County the dog tick is the most common tick and it’s not associated with Lyme disease.
Board member Allen Taylor asked why it seemed that the Canadian medical community isn’t responding to Lyme disease in an expedient manner.
“From what I hear the medical community is pretty much in denial that this can even be and I wonder what’s going on within the medical community to educate the docs so they know to at least look for it,” he said.
Mercer said it’s not that the doctors aren’t educated; it’s that people don’t like the diagnostic process in Canada.
“Our tests in Canada follow the same testing guideline as the CDC (Centre for Disease Control) does in the U.S., but in the U.S. there are clinics that are set up with their own homegrown tests and their own homegrown results who are only too happy to diagnose people who have a variety of similar symptoms with Lyme disease.
“And you do find people in Canada go to the U.S. to these non-regulated and non-standard testing clinics in order to be proved that they have ‘Lyme disease.’”
According to public health there were 358 confirmed cases of Lyme disease in Ontario in 2015, which was a steep increase from 2014 when there were 154 confirmed cases.
“This can be attributed to increased public awareness and reporting, the tick’s expanding range and increases in human-tick encounters,” the report states.
