Focus groups to looking at the impact of tick-borne diseases on community life

Jeff Green | Oct 13, 2021

Kingston and the surrounding area, including parts of South Frontenac, have become known as a so-called sentinel site for the Canadian Lyme Disease Research Network.

Not only is Queen’s University a founding partner in the network, but Kieran Moore, former Medical Officer of Health for the region, is still listed as the Network’s Director.

That is one of the reasons why it is one of the subject regions in a national study out of the Universite de Montreal (UM) that is looking at the impact of ticks on the daily lives of people in a number of regions across the country.

Natasha Nofal, a PHD candidate at the UM, will be facilitating zoom-based focus group conversations about the impact of Lyme on rural and urban lifestyles in late October.

“We put out a call for participants last week through our partners in local public health (KFLAPH), [through a twitter post] and received a very strong response,” she said, “people are really engaged in this issue.”

In addition to KFL&A, Nofal is conducting focus group conversations with Vancouver residents, people from the Estrie-Monteregie region in Quebec, and residents of the Lunenberg region in Nova Scotia.

“Vancouver is in there because it is not a region where Lyme is considered endemic. It is sort of like a control group. The three other regions are all considered endemic for Lyme,” she said.

The focus groups are looking at the impact on behaviours among the entire community, not only people who have already contracted Lyme.

“In some of the focus groups we have conducted in other parts of the country, we have been hearing from people who are not letting their children go outside anymore, who have changed the way they garden, and the way they care for with their pets. The changes people are making to their healthy lifestyles are what we are trying to understand with this study,” she said.

“The questions we will be asking will be open-ended so we hope to get a real sense of the concerns people have.

The insights that come from this study will be integrated with other research findings that the research network is co-ordinating. The team at the UM is also developing large survey for next year that will be conducted across the country.

The study differs from other studies that have been done around Lyme Disease because it looks at the impact on Lyme at the community level, instead of focussing solely on people who have contracted the disease.

“Our research group takes what we call a ‘one health approach’”, said Nofal, who has shifted her professional focus to research after working as a veterinarian for a decade. “It is an approach that is important to my researcher supervisor, and it is a major interest of mine. It is important to look at how Lyme disease arrives in the first place, at the environmental factors, how it moves from one species to another and its impacts on each species.”

Lyme, and other tick-borne diseases that are associated with the black legged tick, are ideal subjects for this approach, since the spread of the territory of the ticks has been a result of climate change, both deer and dogs suffer health impacts from the ticks, and cats are not impacted by the ticks but are ideal carriers.

“When we look at disease, it is important to look at everything together,” Nofal said.

While she said that she is no longer actively seeking participants for the current study, she is interested in hearing about the impacts on people throughout the region.

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