Of the more than 50,000 vector-borne disease cases reported annually to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States, the majority are caused by pathogens spread by ticks. In recent decades, the number of tickborne disease cases reported per year has steadily increased and cases have been reported over an expanding geographic area. In addition, an increasing number of tickborne microbes have been recognized to cause human disease. The distribution of medically important ticks and tickborne disease agents change over time and as a result, the likelihood of human encounters with ticks also changes geographically and temporally. In 2018 CDC initiated a national tick-based surveillance program intended to monitor changes in the distribution, abundance and infection rates in medically important ticks that aimed to provide actionable, evidence-based data to clinicians, the public and policy makers. This presentation provides an overview of CDC’s national tick-based surveillance program and highlights data applications, including: 1) Communicating changes in acarological risk to the public, health care providers and policy makers; 2) Predicting suitable habitat to anticipate continued range expansion of vectors and pathogens; and 3) Predicting future changes in vector distributions under climate change scenarios.
