I imagine it's frustrating to be a public health professional familiar with the actions people can take to avoid Lyme disease and yet finding yourself staring at data telling you that a significant number of Canadians aren't adopting those preventative behaviours.
Researchers associated with the Canadian Lyme Disease Research Network (CLyDRN) recently published a paper detailing a study they undertook during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in which they tried to nail down why so many Canadians are failing to modify their behaviours in the face of the mounting threat that Lyme poses now and in the future.
Between October 2021 and January 2022, they conducted virtual focus groups via Zoom involving close to 100 participants from five provinces (BC, MB, ON, QC, NS). All participants were at least 18 years old and all lived in Lyme endemic regions. They also all self-identified as outdoor enthusiasts, outdoor workers, pet owners or the parents or caregivers of school-age children.
This study found that the adoption of preventive measures amongst participants was haphazard. Those in NS, where Lyme risk is significant, had the highest rates. Those in BC, where the risk is more moderate, had the lowest and seemed largely unaware of their true risk. Manitoba participants, who have long dealt with several species of ticks, reported that tick prevention had long ago become habit.
I'm not going to go into all of the details of this study. You can read those for yourself. But I am going to zero in on one thing: participants pointed to poor messaging as a reason why they had incorrect or incomplete information about their true Lyme risk and how to go about mitigating it. Signage, for instance, was cited as being unhelpful. It often told people that ticks were in the area, but not what that meant or what they should do about it. They also found messaging from the various levels of public health caused confusion which often resulted in no action being taken.
I get what they are saying. Every year, public health units hand talking points on Lyme disease to the media who dutifully publish them. Those talking points just seem so centralized. The same point-form list of preventative measures seems to appear in every publication across the country. And yet the situation in the BC Interior is dramatically different than it is in pretty much all of Nova Scotia. The messaging should be localized or at least regionalized. Instead it's industrial and homogenous and boring and possibly irrelevant. It doesn't alway seem to match the situation on the ground. So no one pays it much attention. And if they're not paying attention, they're unlikely to be adopting any recommendations.
There's also another problem that this study does not address. For many years doctors and public health professionals across Canada were telling patients living outside known endemic areas they couldn't possibly have Lyme disease. As a result, a whole lot of frustrated, angry people turned to the media to tell their stories and those stories connected with large numbers of strangers on a very human level. Public health agencies may have grown more willing in recent years to accept that patients outside those known endemic areas could be contracting Lyme, but collective memory is long and that sudden shift in position creates a striking contradiction that can be hard to assimilate, leading to further confusion. And the very human reaction to confusion is to wait until things become clearer before acting, which is exactly what we are seeing with the reluctance of Canadians to change their behaviour to avoid a Lyme infection. They'll do that only if and when it becomes clear to them that would be helpful, and for many that hasn't yet happened.
