Could the tick that just bit you carry a pathogen that causes Lyme disease or another ailment? If you're worried, you could ship the offending bug to a private testing service to find out. But between August 2016 and January 2017, you could have gotten a free analysis by sending it to Nathan Nieto's lab at Northern Arizona University. You'd get back info on the critter that bit you and, if applicable, a pathology report.
Nieto's project wasn't just a goodwill gesture: It was an unprecedented attempt to include the public in tick research. Nieto, a microbiologist at Northern Arizona University, and his team published the results of their brief tick-collecting experiment Thursday in PLOS One. They say it shows the potential of citizen science to fill in gaps in research—and that data gathered this way could ultimately help form a more proactive public health response when it comes to identifying and preventing tick-borne disease.
Public health officials track the number of reported cases of tick-borne diseases, and researchers can study ticks in their local habitats. But when it comes to assessing the risk of potential infection from tick-born pathogens, figuring out which ticks commonly bite humans, what pathogens they carry, and how many people actually get sick from bites, the picture's always been blurry.
Until now. Usually, Nieto says, scientists collect around 100 ticks at a time for local research using surprisingly low-tech methods (such as dragging a long swath of fabric behind a truck, then counting the number of ticks it catches). In this case, researchers received thousands of ticks. Most had been removed from humans or dogs—and there were many more than they originally planned for.
"We budgeted for 2,400," says Nieto. "Then all of a sudden it was over 16,000." The massive response shows how hungry the public is for information on the ticks that bite them, he says. In the meantime, it fed scientists an unexpectedly large dataset, and information on ticks from 49 states and Puerto Rico.