Sask. researcher studies bacterium that causes Lyme disease

As the ticks known to spread lyme disease are being found further north, researchers at the University of Saskatchewan are learning more about the bacteria.

You may have brushed off a dog tick or two while walking through the woods in Saskatchewan, but the black-legged or deer tick, which can carry Lyme disease, continues to appear where it hasn’t before.

“We get ticks,” said Randy, a Saskatoon resident walking his dog. “She gets ticks, I get ticks. You just have to look for them and pull them off.”

“If we stay on the paths, we’re okay,” said Brian, another frequent visitor to the Sutherland Dog Park. “If we go into the deep grass, which she likes sometimes, that’s when she comes home with some ticks. And she shares.”At the University of Saskatchewan, researchers have been flagging for the black-legged tick, more commonly associated with warmer climates like the United States or provinces to the east and west of Canada.“They just drag kind of sheets around to pick up ticks in different areas,” said Jenny Wachter, principal scientist at the Vaccine and Infectious Diseases Organization (VIDO).

“These past two to three years, they’ve actually been getting the black-legged or deer tick that transmits Lyme disease, and they’ve been doing this for 15 years. And these past two, three years, they’re actually actively getting them.”

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Wachter and her team at VIDO have been studying borrelia burgdorferi, the spiral shaped bacterium that black-legged ticks pick up from birds or mice, then transmit to humans when they bite.

Symptoms of Lyme disease are hard to detect, including fatigue, joint pain, headaches and nausea. Left untreated, Lyme disease can lead to nerve pain, spinal cord inflammation, and “Lyme Arthritis”.

Wachter’s trying to learn how the bacterium survives in the tick and how its behaviour changes once inside the human body, managing to hide itself from the immune system.

“We can’t take what we know about like, E. Coli for example, and compare it back to the causative agent in Lyme disease. So it’s really a unique bacterium, and so we’re working on teasing that apart.”

She says virus-like particles called bacteriophages may offer solutions to vaccination or treatment of the disease.

“Bacteria can be infected by bacteriophages,” said Wachter. “They’re virus-like particles that only attack bacteria and they’re very specific. A bacteriophage that infects the Lyme disease bacteria won’t infect other bacteria typically. So they’re usually very specific.”

Wachter says Lyme disease bacteria contain the genomes for these bacteriophages, so her team is evaluating the role they play throughout the infectious cycle.

“Are they beneficial for the bacterium? Do they need these or can we kind of turn these against the bacteria and use it to help fight infection?” she said.

The Ministry of Health says while black-legged ticks have been spotted, they’re not yet established in the province.

“Small numbers of these ticks are detected in the province each year; they are brought into the province on migrating birds and animals. Data on this is available through www.eTick.ca,” reads a statement from the Ministry of Health. “While this means the risk of acquiring Lyme disease in Saskatchewan is low, it is not zero. Consult a health care provider as soon as possible if you are bitten by a tick and develop symptoms of Lyme disease. The earlier you receive a diagnosis and treatment, the better your chances to make a full recovery.”

Wachter says the ticks that do turn up in the province are adults, usually brought by migrating birds from the south.

“We don’t really know for sure yet if we have an established blacklegged tick population in Saskatchewan, all that we find from active surveillance are adult ticks,” she said. “Until we can find the larval and the nymph, all the other life stages of ticks, we don’t know if we have an established population.”

She adds that it’s not just the spring and early summer months that people should be on the lookout for ticks.

“We often think here in Saskatchewan that tick season is in the spring,” Wachter told CTV News. “But for the blacklegged tick, we also see an uptick in prevalence of the tick in the fall as well. Last year there were 50 submissions of blacklegged ticks, and they all were caught in the fall, not in the spring. So we have to be aware that to look for ticks, not just in the spring, but also in the later months too.”