The Globe and Mail (Canada), May 11, 2018

by Mary Beth Pfeiffer (author of “Lyme: The First Epidemic of Climate Change.”)

Like soldiers in an advancing front, blacklegged ticks are today marching across Canada armed chiefly, but not solely, with a pathogen that indiscriminately sickens and disables: Lyme disease.

In 1990, ticks that carried the infection were found only in Long Point in far southern Ontario. But hitched to birds and enabled by a warmer climate, these blood-sucking arachnids have found a new and rich frontier across vast tracts of the country.

They are in Ontario’s provincial parks, in Quebec’s Montérégie region, where temperatures have risen 0.8 degrees Celsius since 1970, along Manitoba’s Lake of the Woods, and in many parts of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and British Columbia.

Climate change did not cause this scourge but it is surely abetting it. READ MORE.