A type of ‘very aggressive’ tick whose bite can cause allergies to red meat have been crawling northward with New Brunswick getting a few of them every year.
While these ticks are no stranger to the province, leading Canadian tick and Lyme disease researcher, Dr. Vett Lloyd, who is a biology professor at Mount Allison University doesn’t think Lone Star ticks are established in New Brunswick — yet.
“They certainly have no problem feeding, they may not like our winters,” says Dr. Lloyd. “But eventually, we’re going to get a situation where both a female and a male get dropped off in the same area, they find each other and you know, romance ensues, and 8000 eggs later you have a tick population.”
Since they have been collecting ticks, they have received two Lone Star ticks — named after the vaguely white star shape on the females — but says unless we turn back the clock on climate change, which she doesn’t think is possible, we will see more and more of them.
“There was one in 2003 in the Sackville area and that one was actually feeding on a human which is worrying, then again in 2006 we got one from a dog in the St. Stephen area,” says Dr. Lloyd.
She calls these ticks ‘oddballs’ in that their bite can cause humans to experience an allergic reaction when eating meat. She says they transfer a protein that stimulates our immune response:
“That antibody that we develop against the tick saliva or the tick protein then reacts with a sugar that’s present on meat, it’s present in the cells of red meat. So that we essentially get an allergic reaction a few hours after eating red meat.”
It doesn’t happen to everyone and in some cases it seems to wear off after a while.
This map, created by the Centers for Disease Control and prevention, shows the range of the ticks all the way into Maine. The CDC says these ticks are widely distributed in the southeastern and eastern United States.
