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Cameron doesn't exactly agree, and suggested, "Lyme is clearly a missed diagnosis in human medicine -- and people suffer as a result. We treat fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome without a specific test. Why not Lyme?"

How sluggish has human medicine been to respond to Lyme compared to veterinary medicine? While veterinarians are treating, human doctors waver about testing or treating because of insurance issues, which Cameron said is sometimes overstated. But he agreed that some doctors -- particularly in places where Lyme is only now becoming more common -- don't know exactly what to do. Practitioners are also more hesitant about dispensing antibiotics because concerns regarding antibiotic resistance. He added, complicating matters "there's no one magic antibiotic that works for everyone."

What's clear is that Lyme disease is on the rise, as veterinarians -- including the Companion Animal Parasite Council, have warned for years. In 2013, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that Lyme disease is three times more common in people than the agency had previously reported. In fact, looking at those numbers more carefully, it turns out there are more people diagnosed new cases of Lyme than colon cancer, breast cancer or HIV. Of course, this isn't counting Lyme cases not diagnosed or misdiagnosed.

Ford said though testing in dogs is quite good, the disease sometimes goes undiagnosed in dogs, as well.

Confounding matters further in both people and in dogs is co-infection. Wong said that in one study from 2011 of 2,204 Lyme infections, over a 1,400 people were also infected by babesiosis or anaplasmosis, two other tick-borne diseases.

Dr. Andrew Eschner, field services veterinarian (in Gansevoort, NY) at Merial (a pet pharmaceutical company), noted how numerous and worrisome deer ticks are; how Lyme infection in people and dogs essentially cloaks itself to become somewhat invisible to the immune system.

Eschner said the good news is that it takes the deer tick (also called black legged tick) at least 48 hours and up 72 hours to transmit Lyme. So, immediate removal of ticks can be effective to prevent infection.

Dogs have the benefit of veterinary products, which incapacitate ticks, preventing most disease transmission. And there are Lyme vaccines available for dogs, and one vaccine is non-adjuvanted (adjuvants are supplementary additives that help vaccines to do what they're supposed to), arguably making it the most refined and targeted on the market.

When dog owners are proactive about protecting their pet, tick disease can be prevented in nearly every case. So, to avoid tick diseases, such as Lyme, it might be better to be a dog.

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