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"The most prevalent barrier to developing and sustaining a tick surveillance program across time is just lack of funding," Mader said. Universities may absorb some costs, provide diagnostic services and provide labor with student interns. The survey also found that partnerships between tick surveillance programs within state health or agriculture departments often relied on academic partners. Lack of access to pathogen testing services for many programs was another major barrier to getting better information about the public health threat of ticks in an area. "We found that programs just weren't able to be sustained across time." "If you want to know how the public health threat of ticks is changing from year to year, you need to have the data," Mader said. Some programs conducted no tick surveillance. Nearly two-thirds engaged in passive surveillance - a kind of crowdsourcing where members of the public send in tick samples.Īctive surveillance costs more as it requires trained personnel, transport and storage costs, but it offers more detailed location and ecological information that informs risk compared to passive surveillance. The results showed that close to half of the respondents were engaged in active tick surveillance, meaning they collect ticks from the environment. The survey addressed: tick surveillance programs pathogen testing methods tick control practices how data is communicated and barriers to developing and operating programs. Mader and colleagues surveyed 140 vector-borne disease professionals who work in state, county and local public health and vector control agencies.
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"Vector-borne diseases are only going to become an increasing threat in the world, the United States," Mader said, "and we really don't know how to address that threat unless we study it." Public health and medical professionals have seen a dramatic rise in these tick-borne illness over the last 15 years. The study also generated a directory of tick surveillance programs, which did not exist previously.Īside from Lyme disease, multiple tick species can infect people and animals with a wide variety of other pathogens. The study identifies what methods public health agencies use to track ticks, the barriers they have and what aid they might need. The lead author is Emily Mader, program manager of the Northeast Regional Center for Excellence in Vector-Borne Diseases (NEVBD) and a member of the lab of Laura Harrington, professor of entomology, NEVBD director and a co-author of the study. Their report, "A Survey of Tick Surveillance and Control Practices in the United States," published June 17 in the Journal of Medical Entomology. Insufficient infrastructure, limited guidance on best practices and lack of institutional capacity also are impediments to improved tick monitoring, the researchers found. New Cornell-led research shows that inadequate funding is the main barrier to better surveillance and control of ticks, including the blacklegged tick, which spreads Lyme disease, the No.
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