Not every tick carries Lyme, however—and there's no way to know whether the one that's bitten you does, unless you send it out to get tested.
Dawicki, co-founder and CEO of LymeAlert and a physician assistant in Boston, came up with the idea after spending years fielding questions and requests from patients who had been bitten by ticks: Can you test me for Lyme? Can you test the tick for Lyme? How do I know if I have Lyme? "I thought, 'Why not test ticks at home?' That way, patients know when to see a health care professional," she says.
Testing ticks is also problematic. About half or more of people who get bitten by ticks aren’t even aware they’ve been bitten, says Dawicki, so the tick isn't always available to test. Even when it is, doctors and health facilities do not generally perform tests on ticks. You have to pay to send the tick to a commercial testing company or find your state’s health department and send the tick to their labs. Results can take days.
Those concerns still apply if you test a tick at home. But Dawicki says there's value in knowing a tick's Lyme status right away, including getting antibiotics sooner if they're recommended and avoiding them if they're not. “Putting people on antibiotics just in case is not great health care,” she says, which is the current practice that many health care providers follow when someone is bitten by a tick.
If the test is positive, you should inform your doctor and discuss whether you need a course of antibiotics. Dawicki hopes the test will reduce the unnecessary use of antibiotics, and slow the current march toward antibiotic resistance that has already rendered several antibiotics ineffective.
Dawicki and her team are also collecting data on climate, humidity, and migration patterns that affect tick populations to build an AI-based model for predicting where different ticks are likely to spread and what their chances are of carrying the Borrelia bacteria. Such hotspot maps could become a useful source of information for the public to help determine their risk for Lyme disease, and also provide deeper insight into where ticks move and how that affects the incidence of Lyme. The company hopes to develop additional tests for other disease-causing pathogens carried by ticks, like Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, as well for molecules like alpha gal, which in some people can lead to an allergic reaction known as alpha-gal syndrome. “We are working on multiplex test strips for next summer so multiple pathogens can be detected in a single test strip,” she says.
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