New online tick reporting tool seeing plenty of activity

A new online tick reporting tool has seen plenty of activity during its first season of availability in Saskatchewan.

eTick — an online tick reporting website and app created by researchers at Bishop’s University in Sherbrooke, Que — became available to Saskatchewan residents for the first time early last month.

The service allows a person to take a photo of a tick and submit it, where experts will identify the type of tick and the relevant health information. Roughly 1,500 reports have been received as of Thursday afternoon.

“We’ve had great uptake of it,” Dr. Maarten Voordouw with the Department of Veterinary Microbiology at the University of Saskatchewan said.

“It is telling us that lots of people are being bitten by ticks in the province of Saskatchewan.”

The main reason for the online reporting tool is to tell people what type of tick they are seeing, when ticks are biting people, where ticks are being seen, and what type of species each tick is.

Ticks are typically active in the province between April and July with the peak happening in May and June.

While there is no data available yet to tell us if there are more or less ticks than previous years, Voordouw, who previously worked in Connecticut and Switzerland, has been surprised by Saskatchewan’s abundance of ticks.

“One thing that’s surprised me is the sheer number of ticks that people are reporting on their dogs and on themselves,” Voordouw said, adding that eTick was created in Eastern Canada where far less ticks are seen. “People will go out and they might report one or two ticks, but not 50 ticks on their dog, or 100 ticks.”

Voordouw said the system wasn’t designed with Saskatchewan’s tick amounts in mind. Users of the app or website are expected to take a photo of the one or two ticks they see, not taking up to 100 photos or more to individually map out each tick found.

“We have a very high abundance of ticks here, and it’s really a problem from just an unpleasant situation of going out into nature and coming back with that many ticks on you,” he said.

The most common tick species in Saskatchewan is the American Dog tick, which does not carry Lyme disease. Black-legged ticks carry Lyme disease, and while they have been reported in Saskatchewan, occurrences are rare.

“Like less than one, two per cent are black-legged ticks,” Voordouw said, looking at the past 10 years without eTick, when people who found ticks could mail them to the University of Saskatchewan or the Roy Romanow Provincial Laboratory to be analyzed.

“The risk is very, very low.”

To protect yourself from finding one of the creepy crawlers on you, Voordouw suggests staying away from long grass when possible, tucking your pants into your socks and wearing light clothes so the dark red and brown ticks are more easily visible.

If one does bite and manages to secrete it’s glue-like saliva to cement itself onto a person, Voordouw suggests using a pair or tweezers to remove them, making sure the entirety of the tick is removed since leaving its mouth attached for long periods of time can lead to infection.

There are a variety of treatments available for dogs. Collar repellents are available, pills can be taken to avoid any illness and liquids can be dripped on the back of a dog’s neck to kill ticks that attempt to bite the animal.

During some of Voordouw’s many tick dragging adventures to collect samples, he has become accustomed to seeing plenty on his clothing at one time. It’s become part of the job.

“At one point, I worked with mosquitoes and actually fed them on my own arm,” he said. “We biologists sometimes do weird things, and maybe in doing those kinds of things you get used to working with them.”