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Quantifying the relationship between human Lyme disease and Borrelia burgdorferi exposure in domestic dogs
- Source :
- Geospatial Health, Vol 14, Iss 1 (2019)
- Publication Year :
- 2019
- Publisher :
- PAGEPress Publications, 2019.
-
Abstract
- Lyme disease (LD) is the most common vector-borne disease in the United States. Early confirmatory diagnosis remains a challenge, while the disease can be debilitating if left untreated. Further, the decision to test is complicated by under-reporting, low positive predictive values of testing in non-endemic areas and travel, which together exacerbate the difficulty in identification of newly endemic areas or areas of emerging concern. Spatio-temporal analyses at the national scale are critical to establishing a baseline human LD risk assessment tool that would allow for the detection of changes in these areas. A well-established surrogate for human LD incidence is canine LD seroprevalence, making it a strong candidate covariate for use in such analyses. In this paper, Bayesian statistical methods were used to fit a spatio-temporal spline regression model to estimate the relationship between human LD incidence and canine seroprevalence, treating the latter as an explanatory covariate. A strong non-linear monotonically increasing association was found. That is, this analysis suggests that mean incidence in humans increases with canine seroprevalence until the seroprevalence in dogs reaches approximately 30%. This finding reinforces the use of canines as sentinels for human LD risk, especially with respect to identifying geographic areas of concern for potential human exposure.
- Subjects :
- Lyme disease
Canine sentinel
Borrelia burgdorferi
USA
Geography (General)
G1-922
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 18271987 and 19707096
- Volume :
- 14
- Issue :
- 1
- Database :
- Directory of Open Access Journals
- Journal :
- Geospatial Health
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- edsdoj.bb9a605f9e48899eaaf1207e0d3ab4
- Document Type :
- article
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.4081/gh.2019.750