oanne Seiff, a resident of Manitoba, contracted Lyme disease a couple of years ago but didn’t remember pulling off the tick that bit her; nor did she have the telltale bullseye rash of a tick bite. Her husband Jeff Marcus, who grew up in New York’s Hudson Valley, about an hour and a half from the eponymous town of Lyme, Connecticut, recognized her symptoms immediately because Lyme disease was common there.
“Even though we had been telling people for months that she had Lyme disease, … we were seeing specialist after specialist, and getting the same run-around.”
Canadian doctors, however, were not convinced.
“Even though we had been telling people for months that she had Lyme disease and that all she needed was about four weeks of antibiotics, we were seeing specialist after specialist, and getting the same run-around,” Marcus says. “She was getting sicker and sicker.” At their wits’ end, they paid thousands of dollars for testing at a certified lab in the United States, which finally convinced a Canadian doctor to treat her.
Ticks carried by migratory birds have been raining down on Canada for years. But it’s only in the last 10 to 15 years, amid a changing climate and the creation of new habitats in the north, that populations of deer ticks (Ixodes scapularis) have been able to establish a permanent beachhead in Canada. They have brought with them a variety of tick-borne diseases, the most common of which is Lyme.
