Even though Vett Lloyd spends a good amount of her time studying ticks and the diseases they carry around, she’s a strong proponent of getting outdoors this spring and summer.
The Mount Allison professor and researcher runs the Lloyd Tick Lab studying vector biology, primarily focusing on ticks.
Hear an interview with Vett Lloyd from Tantramar Report on May 28:
“The ticks are here,” says Lloyd. “They’re not going anywhere. We just have to get used to them and practice some really easy things to keep ourselves safer.“
With that in mind, Lloyd shared some ‘best practices’ when it comes to keeping yourself safe from ticks.
BUG SPRAY
“Bug spray is really designed for mosquitoes,” says Lloyd, “but there are some sprays that say they’re good for ticks. They will give you partial protection.” Lloyd says just “follow the instructions on the label.”
TICK-REPELLENT CLOTHING
“If you’re working in the bush, if you’re hunting, camping, that sort of long exposure, you can get clothing that has permethrin—a tick repellent—embedded in it. That works quite well,” says Lloyd.
RUBBER BOOTS
“If you’re just tromping around in long grass, and you’re not particularly worried about being fashion-forward, rubber boots work remarkably well,” says Lloyd. “Something a farmer once said to me when I started this work is ticks don’t like rubber. I haven’t tested that scientifically, but from my experience, it actually does seem to work.”
DAILY TICK CHECKS
“Probably the most important thing you can do is a tick check,” says Lloyd. She recommends it becomes part of an evening routing. “You know, you brush your teeth, you usually change into night clothes. At some point there’s a period where you’re not wearing clothes,” says Lloyd. “Either get someone to look at you or stand in front of a mirror. What you’re looking for are things that look like freckles. But it’s a freckle that wasn’t there the day before, and it’s a freckle with legs. The legs really are the giveaway.”
“They are small,” she says. “They don’t look like much until you have a good look at them. But they do have legs.”
And a tick check should include more than just the obvious, says Lloyd. “Check armpits, various cracks, crevices throughout the body,” says Lloyd. “I think most people can probably figure out where the cracks and crevices are in their body without me having to explain it.”
GETTING RID OF A TICK
If you spot a tick, the next step is removing it.
“There’s a whole mystique about how to remove a tick,” says Lloyd. “People swear by technique A versus technique B. I’ve even seen social shaming about tick removal techniques. Generally speaking, as long as the tick gets out of you, it’s all better than the tick not getting out of you.”
Lloyd says tweezers will do the trick, and it’s similar to removing a splinter. “If you just can’t face that you can go to a health care provider and get them to take it out of you,” says Lloyd.
Either way, Lloyd recommends getting all of the tick, and getting it out intact. “You don’t want to shred the tick,” says Lloyd. “You don’t want to burn it, or strangle it, or coat it in Vaseline.”
That’s because a dying tick poses a last bit of danger. “Its little final revenge is to spit its gut contents into your bloodstream,” says Lloyd. “And its gut contents happen to be where all the bad bacteria are.”
Those bad bacteria could include Lyme disease, the number one fear when it comes to ticks. But not all ticks carry Lyme disease, and not even all species of tick.
“There are two types of ticks that are fairly common in this area that end up on people,” says Lloyd. “The wood tick or dog tick, and that’s the less bad kind. Or the black-legged tick, also called the deer tick. That’s the kind that carries Lyme disease.”
The wood or dog tick will have irregular white patches on its back, says Lloyd. And the deer tick or black-legged tick will have “sometimes orange, sometimes grey, but no white on the back.”
For those unsure about identifying a tick themselves, Lloyd says she welcomes pictures emailed to her lab (ticktesting (at) mta (dot) ca) for identification purposes. Also, etick.ca accepts photo submissions, and compiles data from identified ticks into a public database and map, which is morbidly fascinating to peruse. (Out of the 29 stick.ca submissions from New Brunswick in May, 19 were identified at backlogged ticks, and ten of those were found on humans.)
Lloyd says that while etick.ca will not test ticks, they will identify it and send public health information relevant to the species in question.
NOT ALL DEER TICKS…
Of course not all deer ticks carry Lyme disease. Though in some places, the chances are astonishingly high.
“The percent of deer ticks that have Lyme disease differs in different regions,” says Lloyd. “It’s basically higher the further south you get. So South Shore [of Nova Scotia], you’re a bit over 50%. Anywhere in New Brunswick, you’re talking 10 to 20%, depending on where you are.”
If you have an actual tick that you are concerned with, and would like it tested, Lloyd’s lab also offers tick testing through a commercial service called Geneticks, for about $50.
“There are a few areas where Public Health will still test it,” says Lloyd. “So you could try them, because that’s free. Some veterinarians have arrangements where they can get free testing through public health, but it’s sort of hit or miss.”
“Public Health is just monitoring areas of emerging disease. From their point of view, once they know there’s a problem, they don’t have to monitor it anymore. Which isn’t ideal for the people living in the areas with problems,” says Lloyd. “The Public Health program is a surveillance program. It’s not designed to address the risk of tick borne disease.”
The more abundant ticks become, the less available is tick testing, it seems. It’s something that comes down to resources, says Lloyd. “In areas of Nova Scotia, where ticks are just so abundant, the public health recommendation is to keep the ticks in case it needs to be tested later, and just wait to see if you get sick, or have a rash or have a fever,” says Lloyd.
“That doesn’t necessarily work that well for people,” she says, “because depending on the person, they can be quite worried.” And catching Lyme disease early is a big advantage in treatment. “Treating later stage Lyme disease is a lot tougher than preventing it from happening in the first place,” says Lloyd.
REDUCING TICK POPULATIONS AROUND YOUR HOME
There are some things people can do on their properties to reduce tick populations. Keeping grass short around your house helps, says Lloyd. And acidic mulches can be helpful, too. “They work in a number of different ways. The cedar mulches smell bad to ticks. And they also wick the water away. So it’s just an uncomfortable place for ticks to be.”
There are pest control companies that will spray for ticks, but Lloyd says this is something that mostly happens in industrial settings, and can also impact populations of beneficials insects.
One of the ways ticks move around is on other animals, like mice and birds. “If you think about making a house that is mouse-proof and bird-proof… It’s a bit extreme and also a lousy way to live.”
It’s about weighing risks and benefits, says Lloyd, something we are more accustomed to doing in the pandemic.
“One could stay inside quivering in fear, but it is spring and getting outside is really important for mental health and physical health. So we should do it. And the risk of ticks can be managed fairly easily through being aware of the risk, bug spray, tick checks, testing.”
WHY DOES NOVA SCOTIA HAVE SO MANY TICKS?
“Nova Scotia wins the Canadian ‘Most Ticks Per Person’ award,” says Lloyd, which doesn’t bode well for the Tantramar area, as immediate neighbours. But this inauspicious title begs the question: why?
“It’s primarily climate driven, due to climate change,” says Lloyd.
Ticks were introduced to Canada on birds, says Lloyd. “As they migrate north in the spring, they would be coming from areas with lots of ticks. Traditionally, the ticks would drop off, they’d live for a summer. They could certainly cause problems and cause disease by biting people during that time. But when we had harsher winters, most of the ticks died off… And the other side of that is the wild mammals they lived on, the wild mice and so forth, were also having a tough time with the winter.”
These days, “the climate has gotten easier, so the ticks are surviving,” says Lloyd. “And every adult female who gets through the winter, she finds an adult male, they find blood, and then that female can produce about 3000 little baby ticks. So that means the population can spike really, really quickly once they get going.”
“What we see is that the tick populations are increasing in the south. Basically, the further south you are, the more ticks there are. And they sort of peter out as you go up north,” says Lloyd.
“The problem is that the human population also likes the warmth, so we’re clustered across the southern border as a whole.”