Lyme Disease: A Community-Based Citizen Education Project

Posted by Miles Dietz-Castel on June 23rd, 2020 Posted in: From the GMR, Funding, News from the Region, Outreach

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We at the GMR office are pleased to announce that the University of Minnesota-Duluth has been granted a Health Information Outreach award to support their research into Lyme disease:

Description – This project is a concerted effort to tackle the emerging epidemic of Lyme disease in the upper Midwest. Dr. Ben Clarke and his team at the University of Minnesota-Duluth will be promoting awareness of Lyme and other tick-borne diseases through educational outreach activities, a citizen-science program, and an undergraduate research experience. The primary component of this research project comes in the form of distributed tick-kits. These kits contain: information cards on tick/Lyme disease identification, a tick removal ‘key’, collection tubes, and mailing envelopes. Volunteer residents and visitors of Minnesota’s northeast Arrowhead region will utilize these kits to capture ticks, record attendant information, and mail them back to the research team for analysis.

Objectives – This project aims to empower the community to help with research to 1) Raise public awareness to Ixodes (ticks). 2) Educate Arrowhead Region residents about Lyme disease and tick-borne diseases.  3) Educate the public about countermeasures to tick-borne disease exposure. 4) Engage public in health-related citizen science. 5) Provide biomedical research opportunities for college students. 6) Create Lyme disease risk maps of the Arrowhead Region of Minnesota.