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In the last two years, Nathan Nieto's laboratory at Northern Arizona University has received a lot of packages – more than 12,000, to be precise.
Inside each was a small tick, or several of them. an badociate professor at the Department of Biological Sciences at the NAU, has collected a total of about 16,000 of these insects as part of a large citizen science study on ticks and pathogens that they carry. .
For each specimen, Neito asked shippers to provide information about where, when, and how it was found. Then, his team tested the ticks for a variety of different pathogens, including the bacteria that cause Lyme disease.
The result is a map of tick-to-human contact occurrences across the United States. By recording any place where a tick was found by a human, it indicates hot spots of tick activity, Nieto said. More surprisingly, the study found ticks likely to transmit Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases in 83 countries where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had not previously registered them. positive for bacteria causing Lyme disease Borrelia burgdorferi . In all, the research team found 13 species of ticks, including the two most likely to carry Lyme disease,
The mapping effort is important because Lyme can be an infection unpleasant with symptoms that include chronic fatigue, term memory problems, rashes, arthritis, facial paralysis, inflammation of the brain and intermittent pain in the tendons, muscles, joints and bones.
According to the CDC, the disease affects nearly 300,000 Americans each year.
this can help doctors be more aware of some of the less expected places where the disease might appear, Nieto said. His study has recorded ticks in several states where many doctors do not collect them and do not have a system in place to badess and report tick-borne disease risk.
The disease moves with people and animals across the landscape. "The ticks and types of species we come into contact with all over North America are dynamic," he said. hosts, climate change and people carrying ticks and pathogens, forcing us to be very aware of tick-borne diseases in North America.
Nieto warned, however, that this does not mean that bedbugs occur naturally in this region, as is the case with some data from Arizona, he says.
Some ticks with the potential to transmit Lyme disease or other diseases were sent from the counties of Pima and Maricopa. but Ni Eto said that these ticks were probably picked up in another state and then transported to Arizona before people notice them and report them.
Over the years, his laboratory has tested more than 600 ticks in the state and has never had a positive test. Borrelia burgdorferi bacterium, says Nieto.
Some deep ravines in the Hualapai Mountains are the only place where ticks capable of transmitting Lyme exist naturally, but his laboratory has never found any, Nieto The money that allowed Nieto's laboratory to Providing a free tick identification and testing service for the study of citizen science came from the Bay Area Lyme Foundation.
The number of ticks received by his research team was six times higher than Attendant, says Nieto. Once they tested each bug, they would reply to the sender to communicate the test results to them.
Another point to remember, he said, is that citizen science was a great way to quickly gather a lot of information.
Lyme Tests
A portion of the tick's DNA collected by Nieto is sent across the city to TGen North's Genomics Research Institute, which has offices near Flagstaff. Pulliam Airport
In 2016, TGen developed a Lyme test that works by genetic sequencing. It targets and amplifies specific regions of the Lyme bacteria DNA as well as specific genes in related bacteria. This amplified DNA is sequenced, then the researchers determine the bacterial species present in the sample by searching for the specific DNA code of Lyme or other bacteria.
Since then, researchers have refined the accuracy and sensitivity of the test, rationalizing it, and adding other tick-borne disease targets to make it a more comprehensive test, said Jolene Bowers, a professor. research badistant at TGen. This is particularly useful because several tick-borne pathogens meet and can cause co-infections, so doctors could use one of the TGen tests to cover them all, said Bowers
. During the initial phase where the bacteria are still in the blood of a person and have not yet migrated to the cartilage, she said. But because of a lack of funding and difficulty in finding human blood samples positive for Lyme disease, TGen has not done much work to validate the test on humans and instead focuses on research applications and epidemiology. What could be used on the patients was the ultimate goal, but Bowers is far from saying that the TGen test could become the "all-end-all" for Lyme detection.
It's a niche test, she says. Instead, she suggested that it could be used as a companion for the test already on the market that tends to work better for people who have been suffering from Lyme for a while.
"It's good to have in the arsenal, but there should be others who take a different approach," said Mr. Bowers
.
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