After I was recently nailed by a tick, I was told that my local health unit no longer sends them out for Lyme disease testing. Is this the case everywhere?—Colby Mann, via email
Not necessarily. “It’s really going to depend on where you are in Canada,” says Janet Sperling, an entomologist and the president of the Canadian Lyme Disease Foundation. Every public health office is different. “But in Ontario, for example, they’ve tested enough ticks to know there’s Lyme disease present,” she says. “So in some areas, they’re going to say, ‘Let’s just assume that this tick has Lyme disease.’ ” And therefore, they’re probably not going to bother sending it out for testing.
Even if they did, it wouldn’t be immediately helpful for you. “One of the problems—and we’ve heard this fairly frequently—is that it was taking way too long to get results,” says Sperling. “It could be up to three months before you’d find out if the tick was carrying the bacteria that causes Lyme. And that’s too late.” (You may have already developed symptoms.)
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Her advice? “If you have a cottage in an area where you know you’re going to be exposed to ticks at some point, you want to lower your risk of attachment—by wearing protective clothing, by doing tick checks, and so on,” she says. “By taking every precaution to avoid a tick attachment, hopefully, you’re only going to have maybe one attachment every couple of years. And then if that does happen, what I would do? I’d send the tick to a private testing lab.”
The company Geneticks, in Uxbridge, Ont., for example, will test ticks for Lyme along with other common pathogens that ticks can carry (see “Tick Talk, Tick Talk” in our Early Summer ’26 issue for more info on those baddies). “The lab can also tell you how well-fed that tick was,” says Sperling. This means you’ll learn about the likelihood that it transmitted the Lyme-causing bacteria to you. (The longer a tick stays feeding on a host, the more likely that it’s transferred a pathogen to that host.)
“I hate to tell people to spend money, but it’ll give you information that you can act on,” says Sperling. And it’s fast. “Ticks are small. They’re easy to FedEx. So within a week of sending out the tick, you’re going to know something.”
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At Geneticks, the testing costs vary depending on how many pathogens you want to test for, and how quickly you want the results. To test only for Lyme, and to get the results within two to five days, costs $65; at the other end of the price scale, a full suite of testing for Powassan virus and 15 other pathogens, plus getting same-day results, costs $525. (Pricey, but the lab does offer “bulk discounts.” Submitting three ticks at the same time would get you 25 per cent off, and six ticks, 50 per cent off.)
A free option is to ID the tick by taking its photo and uploading it to the app eTick. This can—hopefully—tell you what species bit you and give you at least some information about your Lyme risk; blacklegged ticks are the species most likely to transmit Lyme, so if you’re bitten by a different species, “the chance of it transmitting the Lyme bacteria is much less,” says Sperling. “But it’s not zero.” An app can only do so much. “When you find a spreading rash, and you feel like you’ve been run over by a truck, you’re not going to care what kind of tick bit you.”
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