Dog owners have been warned about a tick boom unfolding along Australia’s east coast, with some experts predicting an unusually bad season for furry friends.
Veterinary scientist and parasitologist Peter Irwin, an emeritus professor at Murdoch University, said the severity of a tick season was largely determined by the preceding weather, and last summer had been very hot and wet along the east coast”.
“That implies the tick season this year will be bad, and indeed it seems to be panning out that way,” he said.
Other experts thought the current explosion was normal for this time of year. But with no official data tracking tick bites or numbers, there was no way to definitively tell.
Dr Alex Grafton, who researches tick-borne pathogens and diseases at the CSIRO, said ticks were present all year round, but people noticed when the adults emerged in springtime. “They’re the ones that love to bite us, and they also are the ones that cause paralysis in our pets.”
Grafton hadn’t seen anything to indicate larger than usual numbers this season. “Every single spring, people say: ‘The ticks are getting really bad, they’re way worse than last year.’ The reality is that every spring, tick numbers explode.”
Paralysis ticks – found along a narrow strip of coastline stretching from north Queensland to Lakes Entrance in Victoria – were responsible for 95% of tick bites in humans, and were potentially lethal to cats, dogs and other animals.
Factors influencing tick seasons were complex, Grafton said. Temperature and humidity played a key role, as well as the abundance of host animals like kangaroos and bandicoots. “You also have human factors as well – how often are people moving in and out of tick habitat?” he said.
If people or their pets were bitten, it was important to remain calm and not to try to pull the tick off. “You should always freeze it, not squeeze it” using tick-freezing spray from a chemist, he said.
On a recent trip to Culburra Beach on the south coast of NSW, Eleanor removed 39 live ticks from her four-year-old Finnish lapphund, Beans.
She was aware it was tick season but “had no idea it would be like this”, she said. Beans was “crawling with parasites”.
“The number of ticks we found on her was nightmarish,” she said. “We spent every evening when the kids went to bed pulling ticks out of her fur.”
Irwin said adult paralysis ticks, mainly active between August and December, were a serious concern for pet owners and veterinarians.
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“Cats and dogs, untreated, will die of tick paralysis. Even treating them is not always successful,” he said. Luckily the disease was largely preventable, with effective collars, tablets and treatments.
Prof Ala Tabor, an animal health specialist with the Queensland alliance for agriculture and food innovation at the University of Queensland, said the larger an animal was the more likely it would be able to survive paralysis tick toxins.
This season the university lost a cow to paralysis ticks, Tabor said.
“We had a bull go down, couldn’t stand up. Before we realised it was a paralysis tick, it was too late and he had to be euthanised. And that’s not happened to our memory on this property, ever.”
Tabor was developing a paralysis tick vaccine for cats and dogs that was being licensed to an Australian company.
Once a vaccine was available, an annual dose would probably be cheaper and easier for pet owners and could provide a solution for animals that had adverse reactions to chemicals in common treatments.
