As Albertans spend more time in the great outdoors this summer to shake off the COVID lock down blues, you should be extra cautious about protecting yourself from ticks, which can infect you with a number of serious bacterial illnesses, such as Lyme disease.

Ticks are also very versatile insect, being able to survive our cold, Canadian winters by simply freezing solid for a few months, and then coming back to life when they get thawed out in the spring.

Wood ticks are the most common in Alberta and do not carry Lyme. Deer ticks, which make up about 30% of the tick population, do carry Lyme as well as other illnesses, but since they are so small and difficult to tell apart, it's best to take precautions from both.

If you discover a tick on your body, removing it carries its own risks. Since a tick burrows its head into your skin, the head can become detached from its body and remain lodged in your skin which can cause infections.

Joe Nemeth is Head of the Board for the Central Alberta Lyme Society Board and lives with the disease, and goes through the proper way to remove a tick.

“If you have a pair of tweezer, grip the tick between its main body and its head, kind of in its neck area, and gently pull it out, it’ll come out. We actually sell a ‘tick kit’ that has tweezer, and antiseptic and all those kinds of things to get a tick out of your body. And then it has a little vile as well that you can send your tick off to see if it’s a deer tick or not.”

From there, contact your local health professionals or veterinary clinic for more details on where you can send them to get tested for Lyme disease, but there are a few other indicators that the tick that you pulled off your body is a carrier for the disease.

Nemeth says if a bullseye style rash appears around the bite you might have Lyme. However, only about a third of people bitten by deer ticks get this bullseye mark, but if you start to develop flu-like symptoms after a day or two, you've likely been infected with Lyme disease.

He says chronic Lyme disease can be difficult to diagnose in Canada and even harder to treat, with many sufferers seeking treatment in the United States or in Europe where their testing is much better.

“The medical community in Canada and even in the U.S. are very reluctant to accept that there is such a thing as chronic Lyme disease, so they tend to be a little uneducated on that. The Germans have done a lot of work with Lyme disease and they are probably ahead of anybody in the world, and there are some very good clinics in Germany. There are a couple of clinics in the U.S., and I went to one of them. It was a pretty positive experience. The odd thing about that clinic is, about 6 months after I went to it and got treatment, the California government shut it down. Now why they did that I’m not sure, but there is a bit of negativity in the medical world in North America to chronic Lyme disease.”

When not engorged with blood, ticks can be very difficult to notice due to how tiny they are. Photo courtesy of the Central Alberta Lyme Society.

He says it's best to get tested and start treatment early, which will give you a chance to possibly get rid of it before it becomes a chronic, lifetime illness, which can lead you vulnerable to other illnesses such as COVID-19.

“With me, it gradually got my energy level down, it accelerated my arthritis, I’m to the point now where I can still work, but I have a very short workday because I don’t have the energy I used to have even five years ago. So it slowly, slowly wears you down. And then it becomes this chronic condition in the background, and if anything else comes along like maybe COVID for example, your immune system is already compromised, so you come to the point where anything else could cause a big problem.”

You can click here to go to the Central Alberta Lyme Society's Facebook page for more information on all the wonderful work they do connect people suffering from Lyme disease. They meet semi-regularly, with meetings taking place over Zoom for the time being. They share stories, talk about different treatment options, and even have guest speakers to talk about their struggles with Lyme.

You can click here for more information about ticks and how to deal with them, courtesy of the Nature Conservancy of Canada.