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The ninth meeting of the Tick-borne Disease Working Group (TBDWG) will be held at the Holiday Inn Washington-Capitol, 550 C Street SW, Washington, DC 20024, from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time. The TBDWG members will focus on plans to develop the next report to the HHS Secretary and Congress on federal tick-borne activities and research, taking into consideration the 2018 report.
Registration:In-person attendance at the meeting is limited to space available. On the day of the meetings, seating will be provided first to persons who have preregistered. People who have not preregistered will be accommodated on a first come, first served basis if additional seats are still available 10 minutes before the meeting starts.
Members of the public may also attend the meeting via webcast. Instructions for attending via webcast will be posted one week prior to the meeting.
Public Comment – Information and Instructions
The public will have an opportunity to present their views to the Working Group during the meeting’s public comment session or by submitting their views in writing. Comments should be pertinent to the meeting discussion.
Verbal comments (in-person):
Requests to provide verbal public comment must be submitted via email by midnight Tuesday, May 28, 2019 (Eastern Time) to tickbornedisease@hhs.gov. In the Subject line please enter: Verbal Public Comment – June 4 Meeting.
A total of 30 minutes has been set aside for verbal comments. Each person will be limited to 3 minutes in order to accommodate as many speakers as possible. If more requests are received than can be accommodated, speakers will be randomly selected.
Your remarks will be broadcast over a live webcast and will become part of the archived recording and meeting summary that will be posted on this website.
Written comments (posted on this webpage and accessible to the public):
Written public comments must be submitted via email by midnight Tuesday, May 28, 2019 (Eastern Time) to tickbornedisease@hhs.gov. In the Subject line please enter: Written Public Comment – June 4 Meeting.
When you submit your written comment, please include a statement letting us know how you would like to be identified with your comment. You may choose to use your name or to be anonymous. You may also list your city and/or state. If you are providing comments on behalf of an organization, please include the name of the organization. We cannot post your comment until you let us know how you would like to be identified.
Comments should either be provided in the body of your email, or in an attachment in Word format and equivalent to no more than 4 pages in Calibri or Times New Roman, 11 point font. Text that exceeds the 4 pages will be deleted.
We cannot post graphics, images, text boxes, or tables. If included with your comment, we will not be able to retain them.
A Lyme disease infected tick is pictured crawling on wood in this undated file photo. (Getty Images)
Nice weather is here and you’re out and about? Be on the lookout for eight-legged menaces on the march. Tick populations armed with the Borrelia bacteria are increasingly creeping into Canada, expanding and growing – and so too the number of tick-borne diseases, predominantly Lyme.
It’s a ticking Lyme bomb, and vastly under-detected across Canada. Dr. Vett Lloyd, a researcher and biology professor at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, says eight out of 10 cases are being missed – along the coast, the number is higher.
The majority of Canadians who have Lyme disease are slipping through the cracks.
“Diagnosis is missed when Lyme disease is not considered as a diagnosis by the physician or patient and when the standard blood testing procedure is fault,” says Lloyd, a member of the new Lyme Disease and Tick-Borne Illnesses Task Force.
Decades-old testing protocols are a failure. Patients and advocacy groups report access-to-care a nightmare. If the disease is treated promptly with antibiotics, people get better. No treatment, and the illness becomes chronic and debilitating. Even deadly.
“It’s a serious and growing epidemic,” says Sue Faber, co-founder of the advocacy group LymeHope. She believes that because of so many missed cases of Lyme disease, “instead of 2,025 annual cases reported by Public Health of Canada, we are actually dealing with approximately 56,000 cases every year in Canada.”
Lyme-disease-carrying ticks are deposited randomly by our friendly migratory birds, such as wrens and robins. Lloyd actually got bit by a tick in her backyard – she describes her Lyme disease battle as “hell.” That’s how many would also describe navigating the health care system for diagnosis and treatment.
Many Canadians are being alienated by the conventional health-care system and seek costly private health care, even beyond the country’s borders, at their own expense, says Lloyd. Others follow home remedies obtained from Dr. Google and either natural products or antibiotics purchased from the black or grey market.
Adds Lloyd: “When Canadians are obtaining health care from the internet and antibiotics from their local drug dealers, I think it is safe to say that the current situation is both dangerous and cruel.”
Dr. Vett Lloyd. (Supplied photo)
Climate change is empowering ticks to grow in numbers. places and pathogens, says Mary Beth Pfeiffer, investigative journalist and author of Lyme: The First Epidemic of Climate Change. “By virtue of the developed world’s lifestyle and influence… we have paved the way for the first global epidemic abetted by climate change. Warming may not have caused this scourge, but it most certainly is enabling it.”
Winnipeg resident Joanne Seiff describes Lyme as “insidious. Being sick with Lyme is awful, and it creeps along – you feel worse and worse but it’s hard to get anyone to believe you.”
She got sick in May, 2016 with what felt like the flu.
“I had recurring fevers, swelling and fatigue that progressed to swollen joints, lymph nodes, and other Lyme symptoms.”
She saw multiple physicians, including specialists, and was dismissed in every case.
“Canadian health systems are unprepared for this. Doctors aren’t well-trained, labs don’t test for all the strains, cases are under-reported and there’s a real sense of disbelief that Lyme – and other tick-borne illnesses – exist here,” says Seiff, author and knitwear designer at joanneseiff.com.
Doctors need to become better educated and responsive, says Seiff, and “follow the protocol that suggests an immediate, prophylactic dose of doxycycline if Lyme disease is at all suspected.”
She also believes laboratory testing needs major updating and tick research proper funding.
Adds Lloyd: “The cost to individual Canadians ill with Lyme disease, and their families and communities, is already appalling in terms of personal suffering. At some point that will translate into a societal cost and change will have to happen.”
It’s a polarizing issue, and what’s more, Faber, a nurse, wants the public to know that
“human to human maternal transmission has been demonstrated in peer-reviewed medical and scientific literature. Lyme disease can be transmitted from mother-to-baby in utero causing miscarriage, death and/or newborn infection.”
Both Faber and LymeHope (lymehope.ca) co-founder/lawyer Jennifer Kravis believe they unknowingly transmitted Lyme disease to their children while pregnant. The medical world isn’t convinced, including the Health Canada website, that says “there is not enough evidence to confirm that Lyme disease during pregnancy has adverse effects for the fetus…”
Meanwhile, if you suspect you have Lyme disease, Jim Wilson, of Canadian Lyme Disease Foundation, advises “asking your doctor for the standard Lyme test with the full understanding that if the results comes back negative that in no way rules out Lyme disease.” More guidance is available at canlyme.com, including prevention and safe tick removal.
Protect yourself with tips from microbiologist and author Jason Tetro:
When outside, wear long, light-coloured protective clothing and tuck in pant legs into socks or boots.
Always use a product containing DEET such as Off! Deep Woods Tick.
After being outdoors, check your entire body for ticks including under the arms, inside the belly button and in and around the hair. Check your clothing, gear and pets for ticks.
Shower within two hours of coming indoors and throw clothing in a dryer on high heat for 10 minutes.
Yolanda Hadid Opens Up About Her Battle With Lyme Disease
**Comment**
Once again, an independent Canadian tick researcher has proven that climate change has ZIPPO to do with this, despite what a journalist selling a book with that title states.
I find it highly interesting that groups will promote Pffeifer’s book but not actual research showing how ticks proliferate. To state that climate change is “empowering ticks,” shows a real lack of understanding of ticks. They are extremely ecoadaptive and will be the last species on the planet besides the IRS.
It’s important we do not fall prey as Science has to populism and schticks in efforts of obtaining grant money for research. Lyme/MSIDS has been driven by politics and power since inception.
We should know better and refuse to climb into bed with the devil.
Climate data never has and never will help extremely sick patients. So much research on practical issues is screaming to be done that will actually make a difference.
New research from theCompanion Animal Parasite Council (CAPC)gives people and their health care providers a way to assess their risk for Lyme disease, thanks to man’s best friend. The studyconfirms dogs are sentinels to assess human risk for tick-borne Lyme disease.
Lyme disease (LD) is the most common vector-borne disease in the United States. Early confirmatory diagnosis remains a challenge, while the disease can be debilitating if left untreated. Further, the decision to test is complicated by under-reporting, low positive predictive values of testing in non-endemic areas and travel, which together exacerbate the difficulty in identification of newly endemic areas or areas of emerging concern. Spatio-temporal analyses at the national scale are critical to establishing a baseline human LD risk assessment tool that would allow for the detection of changes in these areas. A well-established surrogate for human LD incidence is canine LD seroprevalence, making it a strong candidate covariate for use in such analyses. In this paper, Bayesian statistical methods were used to fit a spatio-temporal spline regression model to estimate the relationship between human LD incidence and canine seroprevalence, treating the latter as an explanatory covariate. A strong non-linear monotonically increasing association was found. That is, this analysis suggests that mean incidence in humans increases with canine seroprevalence until the seroprevalence in dogs reaches approximately 30%. This finding reinforces the use of canines as sentinels for human LD risk, especially with respect to identifying geographic areas of concern for potential human exposure.
Joining me to discuss the study and it’s uses is Dr. Craig Prior. Dr. Prior is a board member and past-president of the Companion Animal Parasite Council (CAPC). From Australia, he’s been a practicing veterinarian in Nashville, Tennessee for over 25 years and currently consults with vets nationwide.
Going outside? Watch out for unusual tick found in Eastern Kentucky
By WYMT News Staff
Posted: May 24, 2019
MARTIN COUNTY, KY. (WAVE) – It’s Memorial Day weekend and more people will head outside as the summer season kicks off. While you’re out having fun, be sure to keep an eye out for a tick that is new to the area.
This year’s tick season is different in Kentucky because a new tick has popped up in our area.
The University of Kentucky College of Agriculture, Food and Environment has received more calls about seeing ticks, but reports that incidents of tick-borne diseases in the state are very low.
People still need to use precautions because ticks are out there. They’re looking to suck blood three times in their lives in order to reproduce. This year’s tick season is different in Kentucky because a new tick has popped up in our area.
“The most common ticks we have are the Lone Star Ticks and the American Dog Tick,” Spencer County Agriculture agent Bryce Roberts said. “The new one we found is the Asian Longhorned Tick.”
Roberts said the Asian Longhorned Tick was found in Eastern Kentucky, in Martin County.
“It’s very concerning because of the diseases they do carry,” Roberts said.
New ticks bring new diseases. Before or when someone gets a tick disease, they see epidemiologist Dr. Paul Schulz.
“The two we encounter the most are Ehrlichia and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever,” Schulz said.
Schulz said the infectious disease department at Norton Healthcare found its first tick-borne disease of the year in March, a sign that tick season could be starting early.
“(In) well over 50 percent of diagnosed infections, the patient didn’t know they had tick exposure,” Schulz said.
People often don’t see or feel when a tick is biting them. However, there are ways to protect yourself and your summer experience: Cover up as much of your skin as you can, use a spray with DEET, avoid overgrown wooded areas, check yourself and your children every night.
https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2019/01/14/multistate-infestation-with-the-exotic-disease-vector-tick-haemaphysalis-longhornis-u-s-aug-2017-sept-2018/Where this tick exists, it is an important vector of human and animal disease agents. In China and Japan, it transmits the severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome virus (SFTSV), which causes a human hemorrhagic fever (2), and Rickettsia japonica, which causes Japanese spotted fever (3). Studies in Asia identified ticks infected with various species of Anaplasma, Babesia, Borrelia, Ehrlichia, and Rickettsia, and all of these pathogen groups circulate zoonotically in the United States (4,5). In addition, parthenogenetic reproduction, a biologic characteristic of this species, allows a single introduced female tick to generate progeny without mating, thus resulting in massive host infestations.
Authorities have been relatively mum on what this tick transmits and I’ve had to dig to find it. So far there are no noted human illnesses caused by this tick in the U.S., but the ones listed above have occurred other countries. Do they really think this tick isn’t going to acquire disease and transmit here? Maybe in an alternative reality, but then again, the CDC lives in an alternative reality.
