Summary of the Public Health Agency of Canada's Action Plan on Lyme Disease

BACKGROUND

Lyme disease is an emerging infectious disease in Canada that requires a comprehensive approach to prevention and control. It is a serious illness caused by a bacterium transmitted by certain types of ticks. The risk of Lyme disease currently exists in southern parts of British Columbia and Manitoba, southern and eastern Ontario, southern Quebec and New Brunswick, and in some locations in Nova Scotia.

OBJECTIVE

To highlight the Public Health Agency of Canada's Action Plan on Lyme Disease, which aims to mitigate the risks to Canadians posed by Lyme disease through concrete activities being undertaken jointly with the provinces, territories, and various stakeholders.

APPROACH

A multidisciplinary approach was used to assess the evidence on Lyme disease in Canada, analyze stakeholder concerns and evaluate what was currently available to inform public health professionals and the public. This assessment informed the development of an action plan intended to address the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of Lyme disease.

RESULTS

The Action Plan on Lyme Disease sets out concrete action to be undertaken over three years, beginning in March 2014. It is built upon three pillars: 1.) Engagement, education and awareness, 2.) Surveillance, prevention and control, and 3.) Research and diagnosis.

CONCLUSION

Effective prevention and control of Lyme disease in Canada requires a coordinated multi-partner and stakeholder engagement approach.

Identifying the last supper: utility of the DNA barcode library for bloodmeal identification in ticks

Ticks are among the most important vectors of disease in the Northern Hemisphere, and a better understanding of their feeding behaviour and life cycle is critical to the management and control of tick-borne zoonoses. DNA-based tools for the identification of residual bloodmeals in hematophagous arthropods have proven useful in the investigation of patterns of host use in nature. Using a blind test approach, we challenged the utility of the DNA barcode library for the identification of vertebrate bloodmeals in engorged, field-collected Ixodes scapularis. Universal vertebrate primers for the COI barcode region successfully amplified DNA from the host bloodmeal and only rarely amplified tick DNA. Of the 61 field-collected ticks, conclusive genus- and species-level identification was possible for 72% of the specimens. In all but two cases, barcode-based identification of the bloodmeal was consistent with the morphological identification of the vertebrate host the ticks were collected from. Possible explanations for mismatches or ambiguities are presented. This study validates the utility of the DNA barcode library as a valuable and reliable resource for the identification of unknown bloodmeals in arthropod vectors of disease. Future directions aimed at the refinement of these techniques to gain additional information and to improve the amplification success of digested vertebrate DNA in tick bloodmeals are discussed.