Climate Change Pushes Ticks Into Canada, Bringing Lyme Disease (and Confusion) With Them

This story was originally published by Undark and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Joanne Seiff, a resident of Manitoba, contracted Lyme disease a couple of years ago but didn't remember pulling off the tick that bit her; nor did she have the telltale bullseye rash of a tick bite. Her husband Jeff Marcus, who grew up in New York's Hudson Valley, about an hour and a half from the eponymous town of Lyme, Connecticut, recognized her symptoms immediately because Lyme disease was common there. Canadian doctors, however, were not convinced. "Even though we had been telling people for months that she had Lyme disease and that all she needed was about four weeks of antibiotics, we were seeing specialist after specialist, and getting the same run-around," Marcus says.