“This study offers a unique and valuable perspective as it looks at the risk to humans that goes beyond the physician-reported infection rates and involves ticks that were found on or near people,” he said. Nieto said the overwhelming study participation from residents nationwide indicates a desire and need for the information, which is often not collected by public health agencies if cases of a tick-borne illness have not been previously reported in a county. Nate Nieto, associate professor in NAU’s Department of Biological Sciences, was a lead author of the study, which was conducted in partnership with the Bay Area Lyme Foundation. The study is based on a massive sample of more than 16,000 ticks collected from Puerto Rico and every state except Alaska.ĭr. Like fleas, ticks can carry diseases that can be transferred to both animals and humans, and a new study by Northern Arizona University suggests their range includes Coconino County, as well as more than 80 other counties nationwide where they have never been previously reported. While plague-bearing fleas often command the attention of parents and pet owners, other tiny terrors may go unnoticed. estimates a total of 70 true cases of Lyme disease in Coconino County. "We would like to show on a map where different variations occur so we can show the public where the areas of highest risk are," Nieto said.Due to the fact that the CDC's data only represents confirmed cases, the actual quantity of Lyme disease cases may be far greater.
The work, he said, relates to the wider mission of his lab, which studies numerous types of zoonotic pathogens, including hantaviruses. "We're interested in identifying reservoirs of the Borreliae and how that translates to risk." "We're going to keep looking," Nieto said. However, soft ticks, which carry pathogens that cause relapsing fever, thrive at higher and drier altitudes, and can be even more of a risk because their bites are less easy to detect.įor now, Nieto said, the current research project will continue to focus on specific areas of California. Nieto explained that the hard ticks carrying Lyme disease do have their geographic limitations, so Arizona-except for a small area in the Hualapai Range near Kingman-remains unaffected. Nieto said a group of undergraduate students, guided by himself and graduate student Stephanie Cinkovich, extracted DNA from the ticks, sequenced the genes and matched them through an online database. The Nieto lab performed the molecular diagnostics and sampling of ticks recovered from parks throughout the Bay Area and NAU's Environmental Genetics and Genomics Laboratory performed the sequencing.
"What we would like, for starters, is for clinicians to understand that Lyme disease is in the West," Nieto said.
Nieto sees the attention as just one more step in raising awareness about tick-borne pathogens. The findings appear online in the March issue of Emerging Infectious Disease. The real surprise, Nieto said, is that his lab also identified Borrelia miyamotoi, only recently recognized as a fever-causing pathogen that affects people. Still, Nieto said the research team, which included collaborators from California, is "surprised at the traction" the story is getting, considering that Lyme disease has been investigated there for 35 years. Lyme, after all, is named after a town in Connecticut and public awareness associates it with ticks in the northeastern United States, even though the disease has also gained a foothold in the upper Midwest. As a result, he said, the disease-usually accompanied by fever, rash and fatigue-often doesn't make the list when doctors are trying to make a diagnosis. "There's conflict about whether the pathogen Borrelia burgdorferi (the bacterial agent of Lyme disease) even exists in these spots," said Nathan Nieto, assistant professor of microbiology at Northern Arizona University.
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