The latest issue of The Lyme Report goes out to subscribers tomorrow and in it I’ll be discussing woodchucks, wood chips, and pleomorphism. And, of course, I’ll be telling you what all of these things have to do with tick-borne illnesses. In tomorrow’s newsletter you will find: 

• FEATURE:  Powassan virus has been getting a lot of press in the past couple of years, so now seems like a good time to discuss what it is, where it’s found, how concerned Canadians should be, and what the future holds.   

• ANALYSIS: Ottawa-area researchers undertook a field study to determine how well wood chips work as a barrier to ticks accessing recreational trails. We’ll take a look at that study and what these researchers learned from their experiment.

• ANALYSIS: A Canadian research lab investigated the controversies and conundrums relating to the microbiological aspects of Lyme disease and I’ll give you the highlights from their massive, wide-ranging report.

• NEWS BRIEFS: A research scientist discusses the limitations of Lyme disease tests, Canadian medical students criticize the lack of climate-related health education, brain doctors weigh in on how Lyme disease contributes to OCD, and Thunder Bay officially records its first Lyme disease case. 

Not yet a subscriber? Click on the button below to read the full newsletter and to gain access to the archives where you will find all previous issues of The Lyme Report.

The first round of research updates for 2020 are a round up of the small flurry of papers that were published in the waining weeks of 2019. From Lyme disease in children to woodchip barriers, it was an eclectic end to a year in which we saw more diversity in Canadian Lyme research than ever before.

These are the research papers that were added to the Lyme Disease in Canada website this month:

• Host dispersal shapes the population structure of a tick-borne bacterial pathogen

• Deconvoluting the diversity of within-host pathogen strains in a multi-locus sequence typing framework

• Lyme disease in children: Data from the Canadian Paediatric Surveillance Program

• Zoonotic Babesia: A scoping review of the global evidence

• Lyme neuroborreliosis presenting as spinal myoclonus

• Lyme Disease Frontiers: Reconciling Borrelia Biology and Clinical Conundrums

• Woodchip borders at the forest ecotone as an environmental control measure to reduce questing tick density along recreational trails in Ottawa, Canada

• A new role for host annexin A2 in establishing bacterial adhesion to vascular endothelial cells: lines of evidence from atomic force microscopy and an in vivo study

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The latest issue of The Lyme Report goes out to subscribers tomorrow and it rings in the New Year by shining a spotlight on some resident tick species you may never have heard of before, a few tick-borne organisms that have been documented in this country for the first time, and the online search habits of Canadians. Here’s what subscribers will find in tomorrow’s issue:

• FEATURE:  Of the roughly 40 ticks species that call Canada home, only a handful carry organisms known to cause illness in humans. In this issue, we’ll take a look at what you need to know about nine of these disease causing tick species, including where they’re found, what pathogens they carry, and how concerned we should be about them.   

• ANALYSIS:  Researchers decided to go looking for evidence that tick-borne pathogens may be present in Canada that have been going undetected. Specifically, they were looking for several species of Babesia and Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato. I’ll take you through what they found, where they found it, and what it all means. 

• INSIGHT: A reference was recently made in a research paper to the online search habits of Canadians in relation to Lyme disease. So I decided to look more closely at what tick-related terms Canadians are searching on, what they (surprisingly) are not searching on and what trends could be identified.

Not yet a subscriber? Click on the button below to read the full newsletter and to gain access to the archives where you will find all previous issues of The Lyme Report.