A community engaged passive surveillance program was utilized to acquire ticks and associated information throughout New York state. Ticks were speciated and screened for several tick-borne pathogens. Of these ticks, only I. scapularis was commonly infected with pathogens of human relevance, including B. burgdorferi, B. miyamotoi, A. phagocytophilum, B. microti, and Powassan virus. In addition, the geographic and temporal distribution of tick species and pathogens was determined. This enabled the construction of a powerful visual analytical mapping tool, tickMAP to track the emergence of ticks and tick-borne pathogens in real-time. The public can use this tool to identify hot-spots of disease emergence, clinicians for supportive evidence during differential diagnosis, and researchers to better understand factors influencing the emergence of ticks and tick-borne diseases in New York. Overall, we have created a community-engaged tick surveillance program and an interactive visual analytical tickMAP that other regions could emulate to provide real-time tracking and an early warning for the emergence of tick-borne diseases.
Copyright: © 2022 Hart et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.