Kopsco Heather L, Duhaime Roland J, Mather Thomas N
Department of Plant Sciences and Entomology, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI, USA.
TickEncounter Resource Center, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI, USA.
J Med Entomol. 2021 Nov 9;58(6):2412-2424. doi: 10.1093/jme/tjab082.
Burgeoning cases of tick-borne disease present a significant public health problem in the United States. Passive tick surveillance gained traction as an effective way to collect epidemiologic data, and in particular, photograph-based tick surveillance can complement in-hand tick specimen identification to amass distribution data and related encounter demographics. We compared the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) code of tick photos submitted to a free public identification service (TickSpotters) from 2014 to 2019 to published nationwide county reports for three tick species of medical concern: Ixodes scapularis Say (Ixodida: Ixodidae), Ixodes pacificus Cooley and Kohls (Ixodida: Ixodidae), and Amblyomma americanum Linneaus (Ixodida: Ixodidae). We tallied the number of TickSpotters submissions for each tick species according to "Reported" or "Established" criteria per county, and found that TickSpotters submissions represented more than half of the reported counties of documented occurrence, and potentially identified hundreds of new counties with the occurrence of these species. We detected the largest number of new county reports of I. scapularis presence in Michigan, North Carolina, and Texas. Tick image submissions revealed potentially nine new counties of occurrence for I. pacificus, and we documented the largest increase in new county reports of A. americanum in Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. These findings demonstrate the utility of crowdsourced photograph-based tick surveillance as a complement to other tick surveillance strategies in documenting tick distributions on a nationwide scale, its potential for identifying new foci, and its ability to highlight at-risk localities that might benefit from tick-bite prevention education.
蜱传疾病病例的不断增加在美国构成了重大的公共卫生问题。被动蜱监测作为收集流行病学数据的一种有效方法受到了关注，特别是基于照片的蜱监测可以补充现场蜱标本鉴定，以积累分布数据和相关接触人口统计学信息。我们将2014年至2019年提交给一个免费公共鉴定服务机构（蜱虫发现者）的蜱照片的联邦信息处理标准（FIPS）代码，与已公布的全国县级报告中三种具有医学意义的蜱种进行了比较：肩突硬蜱（Ixodes scapularis Say，蜱螨目：硬蜱科）、太平洋硬蜱（Ixodes pacificus Cooley和Kohls，蜱螨目：硬蜱科）和美洲钝缘蜱（Amblyomma americanum Linneaus，蜱螨目：硬蜱科）。我们根据每个县的“报告”或“确认”标准统计了每种蜱种提交给蜱虫发现者的数量，发现蜱虫发现者的提交数量占记录有蜱出现的报告县的一半以上，并可能识别出数百个有这些蜱种出现的新县。我们在密歇根州、北卡罗来纳州和得克萨斯州检测到肩突硬蜱存在的新县报告数量最多。蜱图像提交显示太平洋硬蜱可能有9个新出现的县，我们记录到美洲钝缘蜱新县报告数量增加最多的是肯塔基州、伊利诺伊州、印第安纳州和俄亥俄州。这些发现表明，基于照片的众包蜱监测作为其他蜱监测策略的补充，在全国范围内记录蜱的分布、识别新疫源地以及突出可能从蜱叮咬预防教育中受益的高危地区方面具有实用性。
