LDA Co-Funded Research Published

The LDA is pleased to announce the publication of new research which helps to determine the types of ticks, percent of each type found, and what percent of deer ticks carry Borrelia burgdorferi in areas of the Upper Connecticut River Valley of Vermont. Ticks were collected from five sites never before tested and there was “little to no overlap of tick species across sites.” The average % of deer ticks carrying the Lyme disease bacterium was almost 9%. 96% of ticks collected were black legged (deer) ticks, 3% were rabbit ticks, and less than 1% were American dog ticks. The collection sites were deciduous forests, thus probably contributing to the higher number of deer ticks found. This study will most likely lead to further studies in Vermont of tick populations and other diseases they carry, says Alan Giese, PhD, Lyndon State College,VT, the investigator who received an LDA grant for the project published in the peer reviewed journal Northeastern Naturalist in Vol. 20 Issue 1, 2013 as Distribution of Ticks and Prevalence of Borrelia burgdorferi in the Upper Connecticut River Valley of Vermont (Serra, Warden, Fricker, Giese). Giese and colleagues also presented their findings to the Northeast Natural History Conference, Syracuse, NY, in 2012

Link to abstract
https://www.eaglehill.us/NENAonline/articles/NENA-20-1/24-Giese.shtml

LDA note: From 1990- 2011, Vermont had 2,411 Lyme cases reported by CDC. If only 10% are reported, that means about 24,110 cases may have occurred in that time period in Vermont residents.