About This Project

Despite widespread education about ticks, tickborne disease cases are increasing. TickSpotters, the nation's most established crowdsourced digital surveillance program, tracks tick trends and provides tailored risk and prevention information to the public. Using TickSpotters crowdsourced data, we hypothesize that individualized engagement and personalized public health messages tailored to a person's specific tick encounter will increase adoption of best prevention practices.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Tickborne disease incidence is growing and without affordable or acceptable large-scale management techniques or vaccines, research to improve prevention practices is needed. As of 2014, blacklegged ticks, the vector for Lyme disease and many other pathogens, are in roughly 50% of counties across 43 states. There are approximately 300,000 new cases of Lyme each year, and health economists estimate that the current cost to the U.S. healthcare system alone is between $712 million and $1.3 billion annually. Making matters worse and health costs even higher is the increasing incidence of other tickborne illnesses like babesiosis, anaplasmosis, ehrlichiosis, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, and encephalitic viruses which appear to be increasing as their tick vector ranges expand.

What is the significance of this project?

Citizen science-based tick surveillance is a validated and widely-employed tool to estimate and observe changes in tick abundances, disease prevalence, and habitat range. Institutions using these programs are now examining these data to assess behavior and factors related to tick encounters, like where embedded ticks are found on the body, or victim age. However, systems that collect physical tick specimens lack the ability to provide tailored rapid-feedback education regarding tick encounters. From tracking tick encounter trends to detecting and monitoring new tick invasions, TickSpotters’ “power-of-the-crowd” digital photo approach offers a groundbreaking method of collecting valuable entomological data while providing a critical prevention education service.

What are the goals of the project?

Project outputs include web integration of a new photo-based surveillance platform to streamline submissions and reporting, accommodate increased user volume, and facilitate development of real-time tick maps and user-friendly data dashboards to display seasonal tick activity and distribution. We will train volunteer TickExperts to provide templated tailored response emails that estimate risk of disease based on tick species and feeding time, and provide best next steps and tick-bite prevention education. We will survey users to determine whether this citizen-science engagement improves tickborne disease knowledge and prevention behaviors. Responses will be compared to submission data to evaluate correlations among geography, season, tick species, and human demographics like age and sex.