HEALTH - Experts Predicting Risky Year for Lyme Disease in NE United States

With spring just around the corner, veterinarians and ecologists are beginning to warn about ticks and Lyme disease.

The Canadian Veterinary Medical Association (CVMA) has declared March National Tick Awareness Month.

According to their press release, many people don't know one very important fact about ticks: they don't mind cold weather.

In most parts of Canada, tick activity begins when the snow starts to melt and, depending on the tick species, can continue well into late fall.

For example, black-legged ticks that can transmit Lyme disease start looking for animals to feed on when it’s 4°C outside.

“National Tick Awareness Month is a rare opportunity for us to educate and empower pet owners, so we can work together to help prevent the spread of tick-borne diseases that can affect the health of pets and people,” said Dr. Troy Bourque, CVMA President.

Felicia Keesing, an ecologist at Bard College and Rick Ostfeld, an ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York, are predicting 2017 will be a particularly risky year for Lyme in the Northeast United States.

Why?

Because the Hudson River Valley experienced a mouse plague in 2016 with an overwhelming number of the critters.

Having studied Lyme disease for more than 20 years, Keesing and Ostfeld have developed a system to predict how many cases there will be a year in advance by counting the mice the year before.

They have found that mice are very good at transmitting Lyme and are responsible for infecting the majority of ticks carrying Lyme in the Northeast.

"An individual mouse might have 50, 60, even 100 ticks covering its ears and face," Ostfeld told NPR.

There was an increase in ticks and Lyme disease in 2016, and it appears that may be the case again this year.

Ticks and their carriers, like mice, live in wooded or bushy areas with high grass or leaf litter.

To reduce the chances that a tick will transmit disease to you or your pets the CDC recommends the following:

• Check your pets for ticks daily, especially after they spend time outdoors.
• If you find a tick on your dog, remove it right away.
• Ask your veterinarian to conduct a tick check at each exam.
• Talk to your veterinarian about tickborne diseases in your area.
• Reduce tick habitat in your yard.
• Talk with your veterinarian about using tick preventives on your pet.

You can find more information about preventing tick bites on the CDC website.

HEALTH - Research Reveals How Lyme Disease Hides From Antibiotics

(cdc.gov, tick lifecyle)

Researchers of the duplicitous Borreliaburgdorferi (B. burgdorferi) bacterium carried by black-legged (deer) ticks and known to cause Lyme disease are learning more about the evasive characteristics of the bacteria and how it reacts once transmitted from tick to human.

The hope is that continued research may lead to the development of better drugs to tackle Lyme disease.

Lyme disease has been on the rise in recent years across North America, transmitted by ticks carried by migratory birds. Once thought of as a rare disease caught in the deep woods has evolved into a rash of celebrities reporting of diagnosis and those reporting to live with chronic Lyme disease (what Lyme disease, often undetected and untreated, can becomes contracted in their urban backyards.

Common symptoms include skin rash, severe fatigue, motor skill impairment, chronic headaches/migraines, numbness or tingling, swollen lymph nodes, fever and chills, as well as weakness and spasms.

Many of the symptoms mimic those suffered by persons living with Parkinson’s disease, Lupus, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and multiple sclerosis (MS) – making it even more difficult to provide an accurate diagnosis.

Lyme sufferers across North America have been highly critical of the medical communities on both sides of the border for what they feel is ‘archaic and inaccurate testing.'

Many sufferers feel they have slipped through the cracks and are fated to living with a debilitating illness due to misdiagnosis or ineffective treatment (long-term antibiotic use is a preferred method of treatment, which is controversial among medical professionals).

But research is ongoing to help science understand how the mysterious bacterium that causes Lyme disease actually works and travels throughout the human body with speed and ease, with hopes to learn how to stop it or treat it better.

According to a recent study published in Cell Reports, the bacterium uses “an adhesive protein on its surface to grab like a hook onto the endothelial cells that line blood vessels, attaching and detaching rapidly as it migrates to its destination."

Lead report author, Rhodaba Ebady from the University of Toronto said: “This mechanism is how the bacteria can overcome the fast flow of blood and avoid getting swept away.”

In an effort to better observe how the bacterium travel to hard-to-reach tissues, she and her team duplicated conditions inside blood vessels by using human endothelial cells in the lab, studying the bacteria as it carried green fluorescent protein moved across cells in real time.

These researchers discovered that the bacterium relied on a protein called BBK32 to adhere to the endothelial cells, assisting the bacteria much like a bungee cord to move out of the bloodstream and into the surrounding tissue.

This mechanism, according to the research team, works much the same way as leukocytes do (pathogen-fighting white blood cells).

Ebady and her team, through further research, hope that by studying the BBK32 protein they may better discover how bacteria target specific endothelial cells hide in tissues; this could lead to the development of drugs that target the BBK32 to prevent or slow down the spread of Lyme disease.

By Lindsay Seewalt

Lindsay is an experienced journalist and mother of three whose heart and home is always open to a four-legged friend. With her Corgi, Angie, as household editor-in-chief, Lindsay gives back to the animal planet through the written word on anything and all ado about pets. She is passionate about topics regarding animal welfare and responsible pet ownership, which she aims to instill in both her readers and children to be compassionate animal lovers who are conscious and considerate that furry friends around the globe deserve a voice.

HEALTH - Are Ticks and Lyme Disease on the Rise?

With the arrival of warmer spring temperatures, combined with migratory birds and the increased travel of people with their pets, there is a growing abundance of the western blacklegged ticks carrying the Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria - which causes Lyme disease - across North America.

According to Dr. Merten Pearson of Noah's Ark Pet Hospital in Amarillo, TX, his clinic has already seen six cases of Lyme disease in dogs this year – and the Panhandle region does not typically see tick-related illnesses. The vet cites travel of people with their pets as the most likely cause of Lyme in areas not typically known to have Lyme disease-carrying ticks.

Dr. Libby Fulton of Arrowhead Veterinary Clinic in Cochrane, AB has also seen a spike in tick-ridden dogs over the last couple of years.

In January of 2015, Fulton observed a tick embedded in a dog’s foot that hadn’t left the province or even the town of Cochrane – the earliest find of a tick in the season to date.

Historically, it was believed that Lyme-carrying ticks could only be found in Alberta dogs that had travelled outside of the province. But ticks know no borders.

“There are several vaccines on the market,” said Fulton, adding that her clinic only administers vaccines upon request to higher risk animals (dogs that travel to higher risk areas such as the Eastern seaboard, hunting dogs), although if the recent trend of more ticks each season was to continue she could foresee Calgary and area clinics eventually offering a vaccine as part of protocol.

“It has become a more pertinent issue even compared to last year…ticks are active at 4 degrees Celsius and we did not have that winter kill this year,” she said, adding that tick season has extended this year from possibly January through fall, rather than just over the course of May through July.

Dr. Kirsten Aarbo of the Okotoks Animal Care Centre cautions animal owners to be mindful of other pets carrying ticks.

“We had a lady in Priddis, AB who had over 200 ticks on her horse,” said Aarbo, who can also attest to the discovery of more ticks in recent years, adding that people should be vigilant when looking for ticks – which like to hide in skin folds and crevices.

While ticks carry other types of illnesses, including ehrlichiosis, anaplasmosis and Rocky Mountain spotted fever – Lyme disease is of particular concern, as it is thought by Lyme communities on both sides of the border that there are actually far more human sufferers than formally diagnosed.

Dogs can bring the hard-to-find disease-carrying ticks in from outside, where it can easily fall off the dog and find its way onto the skin of a child or adult.

Lyme disease has been a controversial subject among human sufferers, many who feel as though they are falling through the cracks of a medical community that misdiagnoses Lyme due to archaic or inaccurate testing methods. While the medical community on both sides does not officially recognize the presence of Lyme disease in every province or state, Lyme sufferers beg to differ.

Much like with humans who contract the vector-borne illness, dogs may contract Lyme disease and nobody is the wiser – as dogs may not exhibit symptoms, or at least those easily identifiable; typical symptoms such as appetite loss, extreme lethargy, arthritis and swollen nodes and joints can easily be confused with other illnesses.

The website DogsandTicks reports over 691,000 confirmed cases of Lyme disease in dogs over the past five years. Their interactive map shows the incidence of Lyme and other diseases throughout Canada and the U.S.

The most important method of tick prevention is to check for ticks during the warmer months.

Click for tick removal methods.

By Lindsay Seewalt

Lindsay is an experienced journalist and mother of three whose heart and home is always open to a four-legged friend. With her Corgi, Angie, as household editor-in-chief, Lindsay gives back to the animal planet through the written word on anything and all ado about pets. She is passionate about topics regarding animal welfare and responsible pet ownership, which she aims to instill in both her readers and children to be compassionate animal lovers who are conscious and considerate that furry friends around the globe deserve a voice.