It’s a rite of summer: enjoying time outdoors and all that nature has to offer. But that can come with dangers, and ticks, which can transmit Lyme disease, top the list.
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.
Until now, that meant finding a lab that conducts the test and waiting days for the results. Soon, you''ll be able to do it yourself at home. LymeAlert is the first at-home test for ticks that can detect whether they carry the bacterium Borrelia berdorferi that causes Lyme. To test your tick, you place it in the kit's container, drop in the included solution, put on the lid, crush the tick by twisting the top and grinding it up, and insert a test strip. Within 30 minutes, the strip tells you whether it detected any Lyme-causing bacteria in your tick. The kit is available for $49.99 to pre-order on the company’s website and will ship at the end of August.
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.
Knowing which people are at higher risk for Lyme disease and therefore need confirmatory testing is important, since testing people is a bit complicated. Blood-based Lyme tests pick up antibodies that the body makes against the bacteria, so they may not read positive for several days after a tick bite, and depending on when people get tested, they may lead to false negatives. Knowing whether a tick that was attached to someone carries the Lyme bacterium, however, could provide more context for those results.
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.
No commercial or at-home tick test, including LymeAlert, needs to be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration because these tests do not diagnose Lyme disease. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not recommend getting ticks tested for several reasons. Commercial labs vary in the standards they use, which could affect the accuracy of their results. And even if a tick carries the Lyme-causing bacteria, depending on how long the tick fed, it may not have transmitted it to you. Finally, negative results don’t necessarily mean you’re in the clear, since you might have been bitten by another tick that you didn’t find.
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.
Though LymeAlert does not diagnose Lyme disease in people, it can tell you whether a tick carries Lyme-causing bacteria, Dawicki says. “Nobody knows how much bacteria needs to be transmitted to guarantee an infection,” says Dawicki. “Animal studies from the 1990s and 2000s showed that you would need about 1,000 units of bacteria. We detect down to 400 units.”
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.