Lyme disease researchers seek consensus as number of cases grows

Physical and Biological Sciences News

Scientists have built a large body of knowledge about Lyme disease over the past 40 years, yet controversies remain and the number of cases continues to rise. In the United States, reported cases of Lyme disease, which is transmitted from wild animals to humans by tick bites, have tripled in the past 20 years.A multitude of interacting factors are driving the increase in Lyme disease cases, but their relative importance remains unclear, according to Marm Kilpatrick, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz. Nevertheless, he noted that there are a number of promising strategies for controlling the disease that have not been widely implemented.
Kilpatrick is lead author of a paper published April 24 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B that examines the complex array of factors influencing the prevalence of Lyme disease and identifies the major gaps in understanding that must be filled to control this important disease.
Areas of agreement
Some of the unresolved issues are highly contentious, so Kilpatrick sought input for the paper from a wide range of Lyme disease researchers and developed a consensus on areas of agreement. "I wanted to address these big disputes. We've done so much work, let's identify what the gaps are and fill them so we can move on," he said.
A key missing piece in the Lyme disease puzzle is that scientists lack a detailed understanding of what limits populations of the Ixodes ticks that transmit the disease. Deer are the most important hosts for adult ticks, so the ticks are mostly absent from areas with no deer. But efforts to control ticks by reducing deer populations have had mixed results.
"If you eliminate deer completely, you can usually eliminate ticks. But is there a number to which you can reduce the deer population and have an impact on Lyme disease? We don't have a ...

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