Ticks have a new partner in crime besides Lyme disease.
Driving the news: A new paper in the Canadian Medical Association Journal urged doctors to consider anaplasmosis as an explanation for fevers as ticks increasingly carry and transmit the illness. The infection is pretty easily treatable — it just needs to be detected.
“It’s new,” Dr. Michael Quon, the senior author of the paper, told The Canadian Press. “This is not an infection that we encountered even five years ago in the hospital.”
Why it matters: The warning comes as the tick population has ticked up. Rising temperatures are moving the bloodsuckers northward, particularly in Ontario, Quebec, and Nova Scotia. With more than 40 different species now in Canada, the scope of possible illnesses has grown.
Hard data on tick numbers are difficult to determine, but reports on crowd-sourced tracker eTick.ca were 38.5% higher last month compared to the same time last year.
By the numbers: That said, Lyme disease is still the top tick-borne illness. According to preliminary data from the Public Health Agency of Canada, there were 7,105 reported Lyme cases last year — that’s up 22.3% from 2024, 647.8% from 2015, and 4,868.5% from 2010. The spike could be even higher, as experts believe the 2025 figure is an underestimate.
Zoom out: The good news is that there’s a lot of research right now on preventing tick bites — from pesticide-doused woodchips to lemongrass essential oil — and mitigating the spread of tick-borne illness. The less-good news is that the Canadian Lyme Disease Research Network formally wound down its operations earlier this year after funding ran out.—QH
