Last updated: August 30, 2026
All About Ticks publishes educational content about ticks, tick-borne disease, prevention, identification, and removal for readers in Canada and the United States. The site is written and edited by one person, Phillip George, who is not a physician, veterinarian, or entomologist. Everything below describes how that constraint is handled rather than papering over it: the site's value comes from reading primary sources carefully and citing them next to the claim, not from expertise we do not have.
Source hierarchy
Sources are ranked, and a claim is written to the strongest source available. When two levels disagree, the higher one wins and the disagreement is described on the page rather than hidden.
- National public health agencies. The CDC for the United States and the Public Health Agency of Canada for Canada. These carry the most weight for clinical guidance, symptom timelines, and removal technique.
- Provincial and state health authorities. Public Health Ontario, INSPQ, BCCDC, Manitoba Health, Nova Scotia Health, and the state departments of health. These take precedence over national sources on anything local: risk areas, submission services, and case counts for their own jurisdiction.
- Official surveillance data. The PHAC tick-borne disease surveillance report and CDC Lyme disease data for numbers, in preference to any secondary summary of them.
- University extension services and academic institutions for entomology, habitat, and property-level control.
- Peer-reviewed literature, cited by DOI, where an agency has not addressed a question or where the underlying study is worth pointing at directly.
- Regulators for product questions, such as the EPA on repellent active ingredients.
What does not count as a source, at any level: other tick or health blogs, content aggregators, product marketing copy, pest-control company pages, press releases, social media posts, and the output of a language model. None of those are cited here, and a figure that can only be traced to one of them does not get published.
How a claim gets verified
- The primary source is read, not the summary of it. If a claim comes from CDC, the CDC page is opened and read; the sentence here is written from that page.
- Numbers are checked against the source that generated them, with the year attached. A figure without a traceable origin is left out rather than rounded or attributed vaguely.
- The citation sits next to the claim, not in a bibliography at the bottom, so a reader can check one sentence without auditing a whole page.
- Caveats travel with the number. Where a source qualifies its own data, the qualification comes with it. Recent Canadian Lyme disease counts are a good example: part of the rise reflects a change in Nova Scotia's case definition, and PHAC says so, so we do too.
- Regional variation is stated, not averaged away. Tick species, activity windows, and infection rates differ by region, and a national average is often the least useful number available.
- Uncertainty is written as uncertainty. Where evidence is limited or agencies differ, the page says so instead of choosing the more quotable answer.
- External links open in a new tab with
rel="noopener", and point at the agency's own page rather than at an intermediary.
How medical topics are handled
Tick-borne disease content sits close to real health decisions, so it is written to a narrower brief than the rest of the site.
- We describe, we do not prescribe. Pages report what agencies recommend. They do not recommend drugs, doses, durations, or tests, and they do not tell a reader whether to seek care in a specific case.
- Symptoms are framed as reasons to be evaluated, never as a checklist for self-diagnosis. Where a source describes an illness as rapidly progressive, that urgency is carried through plainly.
- Diagnosis and treatment always route to a clinician. Animal questions route to a veterinarian.
- No individual advice is given by email or anywhere else. See the Contact page for what we can and cannot help with.
- No cures, no unproven protocols, no products. The site sells nothing and recommends no brand.
What we publish, and what we don't
- We publish: removal technique, species identification guidance, seasonal activity, prevention with the evidence attached, property-level control, region-by-region risk context, and summaries of established medical guidance with the source named.
- We don't publish: individual diagnosis or treatment plans, tick identifications from reader photographs, sponsored or guest content, product reviews, or thin pages spun from a template to catch a search query.
Updates and dating
Pages are revised when an agency changes its guidance, when new surveillance data is published, when a cited source moves or disappears, or when a reader reports a credible problem. Most substantive content pages carry a visible byline with the date they were last updated, and several also carry a "What changed in this update" block summarising the revision. Not every page on the site has a visible date yet, and where one is missing we would rather say so than imply otherwise. Corrections are the fastest way to get a page revisited; the Corrections Policy covers how that works end to end.
AI assistance
Research and drafting on this site are assisted by AI tools. Every page is then checked against its primary sources and edited by Phillip George before it is published, and he is accountable for what appears. AI is not used as a source: a claim that cannot be traced to a citable primary source is removed rather than published on a model's say-so. Statistics, dates, species-to-pathogen relationships, and clinical statements are verified against the cited agency page individually, because those are exactly the details a language model will produce fluently and get wrong.
Independence
The site is self-funded and supported by advertising served programmatically through Google AdSense. Advertisers have no input into what is published, no advance sight of pages, and no way to request changes. There are no affiliate links, no sponsored posts, and no paid placements anywhere on the site. Full detail is in the Advertising Disclosure, and what advertising cookies do is covered in the Privacy Policy.
Review status
No page on this site is reviewed by a licensed clinician or a professional entomologist. The Review Policy states plainly what review the content does receive and what readers should do instead of relying on us for clinical decisions.
Corrections
If you believe we have made an error, please see the Corrections Policy. Reader corrections are the main mechanism keeping a one-person site honest, and they are read as such.