Cottage Q&A
QUESTIONMy family and I have been cottaging on Horseshoe Lake for almost 60 years. Recently, there's been some talk about Lyme disease and we want to know if anything has been found in Haliburton County. We have a lot of children who love to hike and we want to protect them.
ANSWER
Lyme disease is an infection caused by the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi, transmitted through the saliva of deer ticks, a.k.a. black-legged ticks, distinguished by dark legs and a grey or brown body. But you won't be able to identify them, says King Wan Wu, a technician with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's biodiversity program, who is working on a book about Canadian ticks; an adult is the size of a sesame seed. Prime deer tick habitat includes the fringe areas between grassland and forest, but Wu notes they can be found almost everywhere. "Deer ticks prefer warm and moist areas," he says, habitats like the north shore of Lake Erie, an established Lyme disease hot spot.
There were 30 reported cases of Lyme disease in Ontario in 2004; however, Atul Jain, supervisor of environmental health at Haliburton, Kawartha, Pine Ridge District Health Unit, reports only eight cases in the entire district since 1987. There are no statistics for Haliburton County specifically.
A 2005 study by the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control and the Lyme Disease Association of Ontario found that many black-legged ticks removed from migrating birds across Canada tested positive for B. burgdorferi, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are spreading the disease. "The survival of ticks carried by birds depends on a lot of environmental factors," Wu says. "I think temperature will prevent them from spreading north. In experiments where tick eggs are buried in the snow, they hatch but they don't survive."
To be on the safe side, experts recommend wearing long-sleeved shirts and pants - even socks. If you get bitten, it's best to have a tick removed by a doctor so it can be sent to a lab. Use tweezers if you remove it yourself, and take the tick to the health unit for testing. If it comes back positive, don't panic. "Most ticks aren't that competent in transmitting the disease," Wu says. If you remove an infected tick within one to two days, you probably won't contract Lyme disease. Symptoms usually occur one to two weeks after a bite and include fever, headache, muscle and joint pain, and often a red bull's-eye skin rash. The illness is treated with antibiotics.
* Published in the April/May 2006 issue of Cottage Life
