
It's safe to say that 2025 got off with a bang around here.
For the first time since this website launched more than a decade ago, I found the time and energy to reorganize the site's content and bring its design up to date. It was a monumental task not least because of the shear volume of research that has been indexed over the years. The adoption of new technology meant that I couldn't simply export records from the old site and import them into the new one and instead had to manually enter the data. But everything is there now, and many of the entries have been improved.
Sifting through the almost 700 Canadian research papers indexed on the site, certain things became apparent. First, research efforts into Lyme disease have picked up in recent years and there is now greater diversity in terms of the subjects being explored and those doing the exploring. While many important topics are still under-researched, the overall trend is heading in the right direction. Still, the fact remains that these research efforts are still quite young and the amount we collectively know about Lyme disease in Canada is dwarfed by what remains to be discovered.
Second, there has been a growing acknowledgement that Lyme disease is just one of several tick-borne illnesses for which risk is rising in Canada. More resources, for instance, are being committed to tracking illnesses like anaplasma, babesia, Borrelia miyomotoi disease and Powassan's encephalitis, diseases that its safe to say the majority of Canadians had never heard of just a few years ago. There is also a growing awareness that individuals can be exposed to more than one pathogen from a single tick bite, complicating recovery.
Among the papers recently added to this site is one that focusses on movement disorders seen in children suffering from Powassan's encephalitis. It's a topic for which little has been written, and the paper was co-authored by a paediatric neurology resident at Alberta's Children's Hospital. You need access to read the full paper, but even the abstract contains some intriguing insights. Check it out: