Nova Scotians watch their backs – and each other’s – during another tick-infested summer | Canada Voices

The outdoors beckoned on a recent Sunday in Nova Scotia’s Lunenburg County, where the weather was 25 degrees and sunny – a perfect spring day. So naturally, Stephanie Tanner’s six-year-old daughter wanted to go outside and play.

Emily spent just 30 minutes in the backyard, romping with the family’s chickens. When she came back inside, she was unknowingly harbouring a dozen parasitic hitchhikers; by the end of the day, her mother would pluck 12 ticks from Emily’s body, finding them everywhere from her groin to her hairline.

Her daughter was grossed out, but Ms. Tanner just shrugged. Such is life now in her corner of Nova Scotia’s South Shore, home to some of the country’s densest populations of blacklegged ticks.

“My husband has had one in his beard. I’ve picked one out of my dog’s gum. I’ve gotten one on the cuticle of my nail,” she says with resignation. “We kind of have the joke that when the wind blows, there’s going to be a tick on it.”

Ms. Tanner, 37, grew up in the house where she’s now raising her two kids so she’s watched as blacklegged ticks have crept into the area and proliferated over the years. But their numbers have exploded in the past decade, seemingly getting worse by the year – not just in Lunenburg County but across Nova Scotia, where local Facebook groups are lighting up with tales of woe.

People have reported finding ticks on their walls and doorframes. Dog owners from Halifax to Tatamagouche on the North Shore are regularly picking them off their pets. During the recent search for the missing siblings in Pictou County, volunteers were returning every day covered in ticks, says Ms. Tanner, who was a part of the search party; one woman counted 32.

“People who haven’t even seen ticks before are seeing them, and seeing many,” says Donna Lugar, founder of the Nova Scotia Lyme Disease Support Group, which she formed in 2013. “I’ve never heard such horror stories as I’ve heard this year.”

And as tick populations have taken off, so too have the diseases they can spread through their bites. The blacklegged tick, also known as the deer tick, is a vector for the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. Infections are largely treatable if caught early but can lead to chronic and debilitating symptoms, such as arthritis, joint pain or neurological issues. In rare cases, it can cause fatal heart complications.

Early signs and symptoms of Lyme disease

They usually start three to 30 days after you have been bitten by an infected black-legged tick. Most people experience mild flu-like symptoms soon after being bitten, while a small number may have more serious symptoms, sometimes weeks after the bite.

Rash Sometimes shaped like a bull’s eye

john sopinski and MURAT YÜKSELIR / THE GLOBE AND MAIL

SOURCE: GOVERNMENT OF CANADA; university of

rhode island

Early signs and symptoms of Lyme disease

They usually start three to 30 days after you have been bitten by an infected black-legged tick. Most people experience mild flu-like symptoms soon after being bitten, while a small number may have more serious symptoms, sometimes weeks after the bite.

Rash Sometimes shaped like a bull’s eye

john sopinski and MURAT YÜKSELIR / THE GLOBE AND MAIL

SOURCE: GOVERNMENT OF CANADA; university of

rhode island

Early signs and symptoms of Lyme disease

They usually start three to 30 days after you have been bitten by an infected black-legged tick. Most people experience mild flu-like symptoms soon after being bitten, while a small number may have more serious symptoms, sometimes weeks after the bite.

Rash Sometimes shaped like a bull’s eye

john sopinski and MURAT YÜKSELIR / THE GLOBE AND MAIL SOURCE: GOVERNMENT OF CANADA;

university of rhode island

Nova Scotia’s first established population of infected blacklegged ticks was identified in 2003, in a rural part of the South Shore. Today, the province has the highest rate of Lyme disease in Canada, with 2,350 confirmed cases last year – a figure that experts say is certainly an underestimate.

Other tick-borne diseases are also emerging, such as anaplasmosis, a potentially severe infection that affected more than 300 people in the province in 2023.

But Nova Scotia is just one frontier in the blacklegged tick’s encroachment into Canada, which seems to have started in earnest in the early aughts.

In 2019, researchers published Canada’s first nationally co-ordinated surveillance snapshot of ticks, which were collected and counted in nearly 100 sites across the country. While Lunenburg had the highest average density of ticks, hot spots were also identified in places such as Kingston, Montreal and Granby, Que.

Meanwhile, nationally reported cases of Lyme disease have climbed from 522 in 2014 to a preliminary count of 5,239 last year. And with every passing year, Canadian seasons are getting warmer, for longer, and the ticks are expanding their range.

“Canada’s heating probably faster than anywhere else in the world, and the ticks are moving into those places as they warm,” says Nick Ogden, director of the modelling hub division with the Public Health Agency of Canada, who has studied ticks and Lyme disease since the 1990s.

“The range expansion of the tick has happened faster than the modelling we did a decade ago. Because it’s actually warming faster than the climate models were telling us back then.”

Communities like Lunenburg County have been ground zero in the great blacklegged tick invasion of Canada. But they also offer a glimpse of what lies ahead for many other swaths of the country, where temperatures are rising and the ticks are inching in.

So what does a tick-infested future look like, exactly, when we are forced to live alongside these new and unwelcome eight-legged neighbours?

‘Can you check if I have a tick?’

In Laura Ferguson’s home in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley, her elementary-aged kids have grown used to the bedtime drill in tick country: Clothes come off, flashlight comes out, and everybody gets checked from head to toe.

“It’s become like brushing our teeth in our house,” says Dr. Ferguson, an assistant professor of biology at Acadia University. “I check all the folds in the ears, behind the ears, and just work our way down.”

Luckily, she’s only found ticks on the kids a couple of times. All of Nova Scotia is considered high risk for Lyme disease but tick densities can be highly variable across the province – or even within communities – and exposure risk varies depending on lifestyle. A condo-dweller in Halifax might go years without encountering a tick, for example, whereas an avid hiker on the South Shore could see them regularly.

But Dr. Ferguson runs a lab that studies ticks, so she understands the risks all too well. And for many Nova Scotians who are also well-versed in the potential threats of ticks – especially those living in the province’s southwestern flank, where Lyme rates are highest – these bloodsucking arachnids have reshaped daily life in ways both big and small.

Lyme disease rates in Nova Scotia are highest among those aged 60 and older. And some senior citizens have become too fearful to go outside, Dr. Ferguson says.

“It is hard to do a tick check by yourself,” she says sympathetically. “The risk of having Lyme disease – and being down and out with that, at this point for them – is not worth it.”

Ask a Doctor: What should I know about ticks and Lyme disease?

For Edward Peill, the first time he ever thought about a tick was in 2012, when he was producing a television show being filmed in the Lunenburg area. A producer from Los Angeles got bitten by a tick behind her ear and wound up contracting Lyme. At the time, it was a novel experience.

Thirteen years later, ticks and Lyme disease are “literally everywhere now,” he says. “I know dozens and dozens of people who’ve contracted Lyme, sometimes multiple times,” Mr. Peill says. “I can say pretty confidently there’s not one person living in this area who doesn’t know someone who’s had Lyme.”

The colder months offer some respite, though Nova Scotian winters are often mild enough now that ticks can still be crawling in January or February.

But during the warmer half of the year, when ticks are most active, Mr. Peill has learned to change his habits and behaviour.

He no longer walks through tall grassy areas, and he and his friends have learned to avoid certain hiking trails. Like many area residents, he regularly inspects himself for ticks, which can be particularly tricky for someone freckled like Mr. Peill (ticks in the nymph life stage – when they are most likely to spread diseases to humans – are roughly the size of a poppy seed). Some people in the area have taken to changing their clothes in the garage before entering the house, he says.

Lyme disease is the most common

tick-borne illness in Canada

There are two types of ticks that carry Borrelia burgdorferi, the

bacteria that cause Lyme disease in humans: The blacklegged or

deer tick is found in Southern and Eastern Canada, and the western

blac-legged tick in the West. They go through a two-year life cycle.

The ticks can become vectors of the Lyme disease-causing bacteria

after feeding on infected birds or rodents. Humans often contract the

disease after being bitten by tiny ticks in the nymph stage.

To prevent disease, ticks should be removed within 48 hours.

Blacklegged or

deer tick

(Ixodes scapularis)

Western

blacklegged tick

(Ixodes pacificus)

Lyme disease is the most common

tick-borne illness in Canada

There are two types of ticks that carry Borrelia burgdorferi, the

bacteria that cause Lyme disease in humans: The blacklegged or

deer tick is found in Southern and Eastern Canada, and the western

blacklegged tick in the West. They go through a two-year life cycle.

The ticks can become vectors of the Lyme disease-causing bacteria

after feeding on infected birds or rodents. Humans often contract the

disease after being bitten by tiny ticks in the nymph stage.

To prevent disease, ticks should be removed within 48 hours.

Blacklegged or

deer tick

(Ixodes scapularis)

Western

blacklegged tick

(Ixodes pacificus)

Lyme disease is the most common tick-borne illness in Canada

There are two types of ticks that carry Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria that cause Lyme disease in humans:

The blacklegged or deer tick is found in Southern and Eastern Canada, and the western blacklegged tick

in the West. They go through a two-year life cycle. The ticks can become vectors of the Lyme disease-

causing bacteria after feeding on infected birds or rodents. Humans often contract the disease after being

bitten by tiny ticks in the nymph stage. To prevent disease, ticks should be removed within 48 hours.

Blacklegged or

deer tick

(Ixodes scapularis)

Western

blacklegged tick

(Ixodes pacificus)

There is also an unspoken sense of solidarity between strangers or acquaintances, now united against a seemingly omnipresent enemy. Recently, Mr. Peill was chatting with someone in a grocery store parking lot when he felt something on his back and found himself asking an unusual favour. “I said, ‘Look, this is weird, but I’m going to lift my shirt up. Can you check if I have a tick?’” The man didn’t bat an eye. “He was like ‘Yeah, lemme check you out.’”

For families with small children, tick repellent and full-body tick checks have become a part of the daily litany of tasks that parents force upon their wriggling children. A tick that’s bitten and burrowed into the skin has also joined the list of reasons for schools and daycares to phone home about.

Erin Locke, the assistant director of a daycare in Shelburne, N.S., says ticks aren’t commonly seen around her child-care centre, which is in the middle of town, but kids sometimes inadvertently bring them from home.

She recalls trying to help a little boy fall asleep a few years ago by rubbing his head, when she discovered an engorged tick on his scalp. She called his mom, who came in a hurry and brought him to the hospital.

“Depending on where the children have been, there are some days where it seems like we find one every day and then all of a sudden we go a few days and we haven’t noticed anything,” she says.

Ms. Locke says some kids at her daycare have contracted Lyme and undergone treatment. But among children who get Lyme disease in Nova Scotia, rates are highest for those between the ages of 5 and 14.

In Blockhouse, about 10 minutes from the town of Lunenburg, Lisa Learning’s sons both contracted Lyme after the family moved into the area in 2014.

For her older son, who was 11 at the time, he never developed a rash, a common symptom of early Lyme disease that affects more than 70 per cent of people. Instead, the first sign of trouble was his “bubble of a knee.” Over the next few weeks, the swelling waxed and waned, even switched over to the other knee.

He eventually developed pain so severe that he needed a walker and stopped going to school. At one point, he was in so much agony he couldn’t get off the couch. His father had to pick him up and carry him over his shoulder to rush him to the hospital.

“He was screaming the whole way to the car,” Ms. Learning says. “It was horrible.”

She has also survived her own brush with tick-borne disease, after getting bitten by a tick in her basement – likely brought into the house by the family dog. Doctors initially suspected her of having meningitis and she underwent a spinal tap, but Ms. Learning was eventually diagnosed with anaplasmosis and treated with antibiotics for 10 weeks.

Such stories have become commonplace in her community, Ms. Learning says. “People are like ‘Okay, yep, I’ve had Lyme three times,’” she says. “It’s a norm. Yet there’s also an underlying constant fear. People are scared.”

In Stephanie Tanner’s four-person household, everyone but her daughter has now had Lyme. Her son was just diagnosed in early June and wound up having a severe allergic reaction to the antibiotics, which sent him to the emergency room with a high fever and trouble breathing.

Ms. Tanner herself continues to have lingering symptoms from a 2023 infection, including fatigue, memory loss and nerve pain.

But the Tanners love the outdoors and they live in one of the most beautiful regions of Canada. Like everyone else who calls this place home – including Mr. Peill and Ms. Learning – they are adapting.

For the Tanners, this means tucking their pants into their socks and taping around their ankles before venturing into the woods. It means leaving the bedroom doors closed as much as possible, so the ticks don’t wander onto their pillows and bedsheets. And it means spending a small fortune on tick repellent spray.

Ms. Tanner admits that she’s probably more relaxed than the next person when it comes to tick encounters but for her, pulling one off her body now is akin to finding a piece of lint. The other day, she and her husband were drinking their morning coffee when he casually asked her a question.

“He’s like ‘Oh, can you take that off my leg,’ and there was one just on his leg,” she says. “It’s kind of just become this way of life for us.”

Defence tacTicks

There’s one thing, however, that would be a game-changer for folks like Ms. Tanner: a Lyme vaccine.

There did used to be a vaccine for Lyme disease, called LYMErix, which was introduced in the late 1990s. But the vaccine suffered from poor sales in the face of rising anti-vaccine sentiment and a class-action lawsuit prompted by claims of side effects such as joint pain and arthritis (subsequent investigations by the drug company and U.S. Food and Drug Administration found no evidence the vaccine caused harm to its recipients). The shot was shelved, and drug companies shied away from pursuing Lyme vaccines.

But in the two decades since, cases of Lyme and other tick-borne diseases have exploded, not just in North America but also in European countries such as Germany, the Netherlands and Poland.

A couple of years ago, Mr. Peill heard from a friend that a pharmaceutical company was recruiting volunteers from Lunenburg to participate in a Phase 3 clinical trial to study a potential vaccine against Lyme disease. He jumped at the chance, and has since received three doses of either a placebo or the real vaccine, called VLA15.

The trial is expected to be completed by the end of the year, according to Kit Longley, a spokesperson for Pfizer, which is co-developing VLA15 with vaccine maker Valneva. And experts say that results from earlier phases of trials have been promising.

“The faster this vaccine can get approved, the sooner we can all breathe a little bit easier,” Mr. Peill says.

Until then, many Nova Scotians on the front lines of the tick invasion are finding ways to fight back. At Acadia University in Wolfville, Dr. Ferguson is doing research to better understand tick biology, exploring questions such as why these parasitic arachnids seem to be better at surviving the winter when infected with pathogens like Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme.

She is also a co-ordinator with eTick, an online resource where Canadians can submit photos of ticks to be quickly identified by trained experts, who can determine the species and its risk of transmitting a tick-borne disease.

Other projects under way at Acadia University include the development of a pesticide for ticks, made from a common fungus that is harmless for people but deadly for blacklegged ticks.

Scientists at Acadia have also teamed up with Ms. Learning to make a natural tick repellent spray called AtlanTick, which she started developing after her sons’ terrifying brush with Lyme disease.

Ms. Learning said she worked with Acadia researchers to conduct testing on ticks, zeroing in on which compounds they found most repellent. “We had little electrodes that we’d put on their head and in their little bum, to measure their reactions to different compounds,” she says.

The winner was PMD, a compound found in lemon eucalyptus, she says. She spent five years working to get her spray – which she says is 100-per-cent effective against ticks for up to five hours – registered with Health Canada’s pest management regulatory agency. As the climate continues to warm, Ms. Learning and her Acadia collaborators are now investigating whether the spray’s efficacy can be maintained at warmer temperatures, or if the formulation needs tweaking.

Survivors of Lyme and other tick-borne diseases have become the province’s loudest and most strident advocates for better education and resources. Ms. Lugar founded her Lyme disease support group after contracting tick-borne diseases herself, and recently, the group submitted a petition to the Nova Scotia Legislature, calling for more education efforts, a specialized clinic and the formation of a task force.

Ms. Lugar says she believes that far more needs to be done to stem the rising tide of misery being unleashed by biting ticks. Studies have shown higher rates of suicidal ideation or attempts among long-time Lyme sufferers and she is in touch with people who’ve applied for medical assistance in dying. She knows others who’ve been forced to sell businesses or drop out of university.

In her town of Bedford, just outside of Halifax, a 28-year-old man recently died of complications from Lyme disease, which he contracted years ago as a child, she says.

Ticks and the diseases they carry pose a serious health risk, she says, but there are steps people can take to protect themselves. She also worries about the stories she hears from Nova Scotians who’ve stopped going into the forest or even venturing into their own backyards.

Nova Scotia is one of the most beautiful places in the country. Its human habitants say the ticks cannot be allowed to take it from them.

“Go out, get the fresh air, enjoy nature. Just do the things you need to do,” Ms. Lugar says. “Even if it means that when you get home, you take your clothes off, throw it in a hot dryer and jump in the shower. You have to do it, for our mental health.”