MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Summer 2018

122 MLCM SUMMER 2018 down. It is a bit-map of frustration. Unfortunately, there are thousands like her in this country. Manifestations of Lyme are so baffling and misunderstood by the medical establishment that patients can quickly become agitated, depressed, or both. Often, this results in their being evaluated for psychiatric issues instead, a demeaning outcome. It’s one reason Green Party leader Elizabeth May introduced private member’s Bill C-442 to develop a national Lyme strategy. Passed unanimously in December 2014, there’s now a federal framework to tackle Lyme. However, uptake has been slow and there are vanishingly few “Lyme- literate” doctors (patients use this term with a saviouresque tone). The received indicator of Lyme – a bullseye rash – occurs in less than 30 per cent of those bitten, and there is otherwise no good test for Lyme exposure. Even the vaunted US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) acknowledges that the standard test fails at least 50 per cent of the time in the crucial early stages of the disease; it isn’t until Lyme’s later disseminated (and often debilitating) stages that tests can deliver a reliable positive. Thus, with no diagnostic surety, orthodoxy-bound doctors are wont to push back. After battling Lyme himself, Jim Wilson founded the coalition and resource group CanLyme. “The enemy here is ignorance, it’s arrogance,” he told a CTV W5 reporter. The bacterium responsible for Lyme, Borrelia burgdorfi , has lived in the environment for millions of years, but jumped into the human population during the 1970s, where it was discovered in the eponymous Connecticut town of Lyme. The CDC now lists Lyme as the biggest vector-borne disease in the US, with approximately 35,000 diagnoses per year and an estimated 300,000 currently afflicted. Canada’s 500–900 annual registered cases are widely acknowledged as a gross underreporting. Ticks are born free of Borrelia ; they acquire it from a reservoir host. Thus, all three blood-sucking life-stages – larvae, nymphs and adults – can carry the pathogen. As science writer Carl Zimmer points out in “The Rise of the Tick,” a 2013 article in Outside , “Ticks are champions at spreading diseases, expanding in both poor countries and rich ones, and delivering an extraordinary menagerie of bacteria, protozoans, and viruses.” A big issue is that many people don’t know they’ve been bitten, because they never see the tick. Tick saliva contains an anesthetic that numbs the area, after which an anti-coagulant is secreted to facilitate blood flow, and finally, a “cement” that keeps the tick’s mouth in place, which is why they’re so hard to pull out. Lyme sufferers are everywhere. In recent years a number of celebrities have gone on record about battles with Lyme: Avril Lavigne, Daryl Hall, Kathleen Hanna, Shania Twain. Kirsten Sweetland, Whistler’s lone Summer Olympian in Brazil in 2016, battled through undiagnosed late-stage Lyme for two years before participating in the Olympic triathlon – a Herculean feat given the demands of training and energy-draining effects of the disease. Lyme disease may be the first epidemic of climate change. As rising global temperatures lead to shorter winters and longer summers in the Northern Hemisphere, blacklegged ticks (genus Ixodes ) that carry Borrelia bacteria have crept northward, and it’s estimated that 80 per cent of Canadians will soon be living in areas that have blacklegged ticks. ( I. pacificus, the local version, is found in Squamish and Whistler, and Pemberton is lousy with them.) Ticks are climbing both latitudes and mountains, and not only in North America; it’s also happening in Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and Russia. It isn’t just ticks moving north, but also other, more commonly infected carriers of Lyme – like white-footed mice. Larval ticks bite mice, then drop off and become nymphs, about the size of a poppy seed (or the head of a pin). This stage climbs a blade of grass or brush and waits for something exhaling CO 2 to come along – which it can detect from 15 metres away. Sometimes it’s a human, but more often than not the next victim is a deer. Although nine of 10 ticks that bite reservoir mice will become infected with Lyme, only one in 10 that bite disease-carrying deer become infected. Deer, however, carry far more ticks than mice – hundreds at a time – making their overabundance as significant a concern as that of mice. In a revealing 2014 essay “What the Deer Are Telling Us,” writer Christopher Ketcham details how removing top predators from the environment leads to unsustainable deer populations, and details how data describes a litany of impacts from hyper-abundant deer in various parts of North America. Most insidious of these is the role of deer as primary host for adult blacklegged ticks. In the 1980s and ’90s, as the incidence of Lyme rose across New England, tongues wagged about an association with spiking deer populations. Adult blacklegged ticks were being reported in densities of up to a thousand per deer, so more deer doubtless meant more adult ticks in an area. But other studies suggested that increase in the disease was tied more to ecological conditions coincidentally favourable to more important links in the Lyme chain – like shrews, chipmunks and mice. As preferred hosts of the tick’s larval and nymph stages, this tiny triumvirate comprise a collective reservoir for transmitting Lyme. Proliferation of mice is promoted both by the same fragmentation of woodlands that facilitate deer overabundance, and by the near- extermination of the rodent’s primary predator, red fox. Coyotes replace foxes in these landscapes because their main predator Adult blacklegged ticks were being reported in densities of up to a thousand per deer. Ticks are like vampires, only worse.