Scientists scramble to forecast where and when the disease-carrying arthropods pose the most danger
To slow down the rapid spread of tick-borne illnesses, the ideal public health strategy would be to predict where the pests are likely to be concentrated—and immediately getting this information to medical professionals and the public. That’s why researchers are trying to develop an accurate way of forecasting where dangerous ticks might be. Such a program could ideally be used like a weather map to anticipate danger areas.
Because some tick protections are annoying and difficult to maintain, says Richard Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, “you don’t necessarily want to employ those methods all the time everywhere. But you might want to employ them where there’s high risk.
Environmental factors that might at first seem unrelated can additionally have strong but indirect effects on tick numbers. For instance, the Cary Institute studied fields in New York State’s Dutchess County for decades and found a strong and peculiar correlation: when the local oak trees produced abundant acorns in a given year, the deer tick population ballooned the following year.
In addition to dealing with such unknowns, combining all these factors into a single model presents other problems. Scientists are working to perfect models that combine known tick factors and spit out something that resembles a weather forecast but for tick abundance. One such initiative at Boston University’s Ecological Forecasting Laboratory involves using the Cary Institute’s long-term tick data to train a type of probability model called a Bayesian network.
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