Dear Editor:
This is my response to three letters in the Wellington Advertiser, Aug. 15 on the topic of climate change grant from Health Canada.
The $300,000 Health Canada grant to study climate change and diseases remains a colossal waste.
For millions of years, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease has successfully survived multiple climate shifts.
The bacterium has evolved through all of these environment changes, and no climate change study by Health Canada is ever going to alter its destructive path.
When it comes to climate change, there is no additional stress put on the blacklegged tick, the primary vector of Lyme disease.
All life stages of this tick descend into the cool, moist leaf litter and are not affected by increases in ambient temperatures.
In fact, the female tick lays her eggs in the stable microclimate of the leaf litter just as she has done for millennia. Regardless of any climate change, she is stable in her microhabitat and lays the same number of eggs.
Therefore, there is no increase or decrease in the level of Lyme disease. When it comes to ticks and Lyme disease, climate change is a triviality.
The climate change study, which is generated by Health Canada will be a failure, and nothing more than a job-creation project for a few public health staff.
In this public health study area, we need health-care practitioners properly trained to diagnose and treat Lyme disease and associated tick-borne diseases. If Health Canada and public health want to benefit Canadians, they need to clean their mud-stained, rose-coloured glasses, and fix the Lyme disease health-care crisis that we have right across this country.
While public health officials are squandering taxpayers’ dollars, peoples’ lives are being destroyed.
The climate change study is yet another ploy to dupe the public, and it will be nothing more than a pile of “maybe this” or “maybe that.”
Not only do taxpayers loathe such inordinate waste, they get saddled with the additional cost of another public health sham.
John D. Scott
Fergus