The Decibel - Why ticks – and Lyme disease – are spreading further north

Episode Date: August 1, 2023

Ticks are awful. They can give you Lyme disease, brain swelling, and can make you allergic to red meat. And as the world warms, they’re steadily creeping further north.After Dr. Vett Lloyd contracted Lyme disease from a tick, she made it her mission to study these parasites. She tells us where ticks are, what to look out for, and what to do if you find one.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Dr. Vette Lloyd does not like ticks. So my tick encounter came from me gardening, trying to pull up weeds. They had other ideas. So it took a certain amount of effort and grubbing in the ground. I noticed the tick on my arm in the evening when I was showering. I eventually ended up getting sick, sudden onset arthritis, followed by cardiac problems, followed by neurological problems, and it got really, really bad. Unfortunately for Tix, this meant war. Because Dr. Lloyd is a professor and researcher with Mount Allison University in New Brunswick.

And once I regained my health, I thought that probably the most useful thing I could do was for me and my lab to work on ticks and work on Lyme disease. So I thought we could do more good for more people by working on ticks. So today, Dr. Lloyd is on the show to tell us what you need to know about these blood-sucking parasites. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Dr. Lloyd, thank you so much for being here today. Well, thank you for inviting me to chat about ticks. Just to get started, we all know that the ticks are kind of gross, right? You definitely don't want them on you.

And a big reason for that is because they can carry Lyme disease, and that is pretty serious. And I know you yourself, Dr. Lloyd, you actually did get Lyme disease. Can I ask, what was living with that disease like? Horrible. The disease is one thing, and it's debilitating, it's progressive. Some people live with the disease for years and years, but they shouldn't have to. It is a bacterial infection, it can be treated. The disease itself is one problem. Probably the second half of that problem, and it may be the bigger part of the problem, was how I was treated by many people within the medical system.

It was very dismissive. Two years previously, I'd gone through cancer, and it was night and day between the compassion shown to cancer patients and the dismissiveness shown to me as someone who felt they had a tick-borne illness. Wow. So you mentioned that Lyme disease is caused by a bacteria carried by a tick. Can you give us some details? What exactly is this bacteria? Borrelia burgdorferi. The bacteria, it uses wild animals to overwinter. So ticks can die in the cold. So what the bacteria does is it gets out of a tick when that tick feeds on a wild animal, say a wild mouse, hangs around in the bloodstream of the mouse. And then when another tick bites the mouse, the bacteria goes back into the new ticks. So that way, the bacteria can spread from one tick to another indirectly via a mouse or any other wild animal.

Okay. So what can a tick pass along when it bites you? So in addition to Lyme disease, which is a bacteria, there's a bacteria that causes anaplasmosis, a bacteria that causes the spotted fevers. There are a number of viruses that cause encephalitis. That's unpleasant. And then there are parasites, sort of malaria-like symptoms. Those are increasing in frequency.

There are some small microscopic worms. Sadly, ticks are really good at transferring pathogens from wild animals to people. Yeah. Wow. And you mentioned encephalitis. That's pretty serious. That's basically the swelling of your brain. So these are not things to be taken lightly. Yeah, they're not. Do we have any sense of how likely it is that a tick is carrying a disease? So like if you get bitten, what are your chances? It depends on where you are. So there's information on the prevalence of each of these pathogens in ticks of different parts of Canada. The thing is, it's all very well to say Southern Ontario,

it's about 25% chance that a tick biting you will have Lyme disease. But if it's on you, or it's on your kid, or your pet, you don't really want to know what the average risk is, you want to know about that specific tick. And for that, your only option is to get the tick tested. Which we definitely will talk about a little further down. But 25% in Southern Ontario, 25% chance that that tick has Lyme disease, then that's a pretty high odds. Yeah, it's kind of Russian roulette. Okay, so let's talk about ticks specifically here. What do they look like? And what are some of the specific physical traits, I guess, that would help someone identify a tick? They're tricky.

They're small. The adult ticks would be about sesame seed sized. The immature juvenile ticks are about the size of a poppy seed. When they're on you, they're crawling fairly slowly. They're black, sort of oval-shaped. And once they've dug in, they will look very much like a freckle. If they're engorged, they're going to fill up with blood, and the back end will balloon out, in which case they can look a bit like a mole.

You want to get them off you before they start filling up with your blood because the longer they drink your blood, the more time they have to swap your blood with their disease-causing bacteria and viruses. So the peak seasons when we get ticks are the spring and the fall. Any self-respecting tick will live for two years usually. If they don't get enough food, which is blood, they'll just hang out and they'll last another year or so. A year without eating? Yeah, and they can even do up to three years. So they'll inject an anesthetic when they bite. and that combined with the fact that they do like cracks and crevices of your body where you're not going to see them makes them a bit harder to detect.

But you can detect them. The way you detect them is with what's called a tick check. Take a look at yourself in the mirror or get someone you know well and who doesn't mind to look at you. And what you're doing is looking at your whole body and you're looking for a freckle with legs. Freckles are good. Freckles with legs are not good. How do they find us in order to eat? So we walk around. We're breathing out carbon dioxide, which to them is delicious. We also have our own personal body smells, which is even more delicious.

Their front legs have their noses, so they can smell us coming. And they will sit up on a blade of grass or a small shrub and do what's called questing, which sounds a lot more exciting than it is. It's like a game of D&D or something. Yeah, it sounds like it should involve a white stallion and a knight in shining armor. It's just hanging onto a piece of grass with your back legs, waving your front legs until you find something that smells good and then hoping that it brushes by you and you can grab it. Wow. Okay. And can they see us? They don't see. They don't have eyes as such. There's probably some awareness of day versus night, but they don't need to see us.

They smell us. How many different kinds of ticks are there in Canada? It depends how hard you're looking. So if you're looking through the wildlife, you can get, you can find sort of 30-ish, a few more. But the ones that we worry about are the ones that are generalists. So they will, they're the sort of, hey, blood is blood type of ticks. And these are the ones that will end up on humans, people, and on pets. The big one that people need to be worried about is the blackleg tick. Some parts of the country, it's called the deer tick. In BC, it's called the western blackleg tick. This is the one that

carries Lyme disease and spreads Lyme disease. So that's the big problem. The southern third of Canada, you're going to see them. There's some areas that are real hotspots. Southern Ontario, huge area. Southern Nova Scotia has the honor of having the highest tick to human population, but Southern Ontario probably wins the total number of tick awards. Manitoba, Quebec, New Brunswick, Saskatchewan, British Columbia, Alberta, the ticks are establishing along the US border, and they're creeping northwards. So I want to ask you about a new kind of tick that we have to watch out for now in Canada, which is the lone star tick. And I want to ask you about a new kind of tick that we have to watch out for now in Canada, which is the Lone Star tick. And I understand, ironically, it does not come from Texas,

even though it's called the Lone Star tick. But can you tell me a little bit more about that, Dr. Lloyd? This tick gets a lot of publicity. It gets a lot of publicity because there's a protein in its saliva that can induce allergies to red meat. So periodically we do get them in the lab. I had one memorable encounter where someone took a tick off their dog. They knocked the front end of it off. So it didn't have what passes for a head in a tick. But even without a head, it could smell me well enough that it was still

hungry and it decided to run down the laboratory bench to see if it could get an extra snack from me. Okay, so this tick is headless and it is running across the lab bench to try to get to you. That's right. And it was stopped by blunt force trauma. I mashed it. We'll be right back. So, Dr. Lloyd, how exactly has the tick population changed over time in Canada? Prior to climate moderation and climate change, the ticks would be brought in. They'd experience a good Canadian winter. They'd either freeze to death or they'd be covered up with snow for so long they would eventually just give up or starve to death. But courtesy of climate

change, the black-legged ticks have found that they are quite happy in the Canadian climate. They're pretty much well established through southern Canada and their populations are establishing increasingly northwards. Is there anything that we can do on a government level to manage tick populations that's effective? Short of an ice age, which would freeze them to death or blasting an area with radiation, which will get rid of the people rather well too. There's not much we can do about the ticks. They are here. They're going to stay for quite a while. So we have to adjust to them. And the adaption part of that is something where government can help. So different parts of

the country, you will see public health messaging targeting specific regional risks. So that's a role government can play in telling people, look, there are ticks out there. This is what you can do to protect yourself. What about things like pesticides or natural predators, maybe? Are there things like that that could help as well? Pesticides can work. They tend to be quite broad spectrum because these are not insects as such. They're members of the spider family. So the pesticides that work on them will also kill off spiders who are, for the most part, beneficial, even though most people consider them utterly icky. There are other approaches that can be used. People talk about a vaccine as sort of the ultimate solution to a problem. A Lyme vaccine was developed. It was pulled off the market due to poor sales.

There's another one being in clinical trials now, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it. Probably before we see that, there's a vaccine that is actually present as an edible bait for rodents. So you can drop that and then the rodents will not carry the Lyme disease bacteria. Doesn't get rid of the ticks, but it gets rid of the problem that the ticks perpetuate by giving people Lyme disease. Okay. So let's talk about prevention now, just on an individual level. What can people do to avoid bites by ticks in the first place? Bug sprays help. Long pants are good if the ticks cannot just crawl up the inside of your pant leg. Because if they can crawl up the inside of your pant leg, all you're doing is making yourself feel hot.

So like put your socks up over your pants then essentially is what you're saying. Yeah, so there's the traditional put your socks up over your pants. It's not fashion forward, but whatever. You can also use gaiters, which are much more fashionable, and perform the same function. And like what you were saying before, then if you have been in natural spaces, do a tick check when you come back in, basically. Yes, you do absolutely do a tick check. And so what do you need to do then, Dr. Lloyd, if you find a tick on you? Okay, so step one, optional part of that is profanity or screaming, your choice,

or simply being quiet. But you do want to get the tick off you. Getting it off you as quickly as possible is a great idea. Sometimes people will go to a hospital ER department and ask someone to take the tick off them. With wait times, it's probably better to do it yourself. I've also had ticks submitted from people where in one particular case, the tick was feeding on a woman's neck. Her husband said, yes, dear, I'll take the tick off you. But first, we must take a picture of it. But he wanted a ruler on it so he could show exactly how big the tick was. So he had to go search around for the ruler, hold it up next to the tick, then fumble with his cell phone to get the perfect shot. I'm pleased to say they did eventually get the tick off them. Yeah. Meanwhile, it's still on her neck as he's doing all of that.

Yes. Yeah. You don't want to squish it. You don't want to coat it with anything, Vaseline, nail polish, kerosene, hold a match to it, whatever. You can just pull it out with tweezers, pull it out with special tick removal tools if you have one, or in a pinch, use your fingers because you usually have them attached to your hand. Okay, so don't, I've heard the match thing before, so don't do a match, just like literally fingers or tweezers and just pull it straight out then. Yeah, tweezers are the preferred approach. You don't want to squish the gut contents back into your body because that's actually what you're trying to avoid. So if you grab it close to the skin, pull slowly up and outwards, you'll get the tick out. Your skin will lift up because the tick is anchored in there with harpoon-like mouth parts. It's

absolutely disgusting, but it doesn't hurt because they've injected an anesthetic. Oh, okay. And then so what do you do after you get it out of your body? In some parts of the country, you submit the picture, and they'll have an entomologist look at it and send you back, this is probably a whatever, and some standard public health advice on that type of tick. So that's why the husband in your story, that's why he wanted the photo and the size and everything like that for the tick. However, one can get that photograph perfectly well once the tick is removed but if you have a very patient spouse who is willing to pose

for a picture of a tick in situ it's still not a great idea yeah okay but my big question though is you i think you want to know if that tick maybe had lyme disease, right? So how do you find that out? So if you've got a black-legged tick on you, you need to know, was your tick infected? For that, there has to be molecular testing. Some places in the country, you can get that testing through the healthcare system or through public health. In other parts of the country, the only option is private. The major company in Canada is a company called GeneTix. You send it in and they will test it and give you back the answer. Unfortunately, you have to pay for that. In some parts of the country where the infection rate is fairly high, you can get a single dose of antibiotics, usually from pharmacists,

so you don't have to deal with trying to get in to see a doctor and wait times and so forth. The protocol says you can give it up to 72 hours after the tick bite. It's almost impossible for an average person to distinguish between, I just saw that tick on me or that tick was on me before, but I didn't notice. So is it a fresh tick just because you saw it on Saturday night? Did you get it Saturday afternoon or had it been feeding there for three days before you noticed? Yeah. And so just to be clear, we're talking about, you know, antibiotics for Lyme disease. There's no cure for Lyme disease, is there? It's a bacterial infection. If you treat it thoroughly in the early stages, there's considered to be very good outcomes. So effectively

cured. The problem crops up as the bacteria are allowed to basically replicate unchecked in the body. They'll spread through the body. They'll take refuge in parts of the body where antibiotics can't reach very well, the joints, the brain, so forth. Then it is much more difficult to get rid of the bacteria. Not impossible, and there's good success with certain protocols. Those protocols are primarily available in the United States, which is a significant problem in Canada,

where we have a lot of Canadians having to leave the country and going to either Europe or the States seeking health care for Lyme disease. Just to end here, Dr. Lloyd, what does the research say about where and how bad tick populations might get in Canada in the future? Unless climate change is going to change its mind, we're going to continue on the same path. The same path will be more ticks, more pathogens, more introduced ticks. So it's a matter of learning to adjust to it. Dr. Lloyd, thank you so much for being here today.

You're very welcome. Thanks for chatting ticks. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wells. Our summer producer is Nagin Nia. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor.

Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.