I'm retiring from tick journalism

It's not my responsibility to monitor and correct the information released to the public by the government about ticks in Canada, but since I feel the need to protect people that were clueless like me, I have been attempting to. What I do normally is read a post in the news, notice it is lacking or withholding information, request that they correct their information to the most up-to-date (based on recent studies and information available) and they tell me their information is from government sources - or they ignore me.

So I'm done doing it. 

Just know that the information they are releasing is intentionally withholding important details about:

a) your likelihood of getting Lyme after a tick bite.
b) your likelihood of getting a variety of other bacterial infections after a tick bite
c) the amount of time a tick has to be attached before infection occurs.
d) what you should do after a tick bite.
e) the ease with which one can find treatment.

They often don't know their information is lacking, as they base their articles on carefully curated provincial or federal government websites, which base their information on Public Health information available, which bases their information on the CDC and so on. 

Why is it incorrect?

For a few reasons.

One being that they simply can't keep up with all the new developments, it's spreading across the country faster than they do cross-country studies on it. If they treated tick-borne illnesses with the same urgency they treated Covid-19 they could get a grasp on it and prevent it. But it's more insidious - and not deadly (in the same way). So it's not prioritized. 

It's also incorrect because some doctors have pushed back. Naturopaths have taken over the bulk of treatment so it has somehow gotten a reputation as being an anti-science movement. Don't ask me how a proven bacterial infection wreaking havoc on the human body can in any way become something you either believe in or don't, like fairys or magic beans, but there is a body of people that do not believe patients. Here's one example: https://twitter.com/LymeScience. This person also has a website: https://lymescience.org/