Effect of Rising Temperature on Lyme Disease: Ixodes scapularis Population Dynamics and Borrelia burgdorferi Transmission and Prevalence

Warmer temperatures are expected to increase the incidence of Lyme disease through enhanced tick maturation rates and a longer season of transmission. In addition, there could be an increased risk of disease export because of infected mobile hosts, usually birds. A temperature-driven seasonal model of Borrelia burgdorferi (Lyme disease) transmission among four host types is constructed as a system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations. The model is developed and parametrized based on a collection of lab and field studies. The model is shown to produce biologically reasonable results for both the tick vector (Ixodes scapularis) and the hosts when compared to a different set of studies. The model is used to predict the response of Lyme disease risk to a mean annual temperature increase, based on current temperature cycles in Hanover, NH. Many of the risk measures suggested by the literature are shown to change with increased mean annual temperature. The most straightforward measure of disease risk is the abundance of infected questing ticks, averaged over a year. Compared to this measure, which is difficult and resource-intensive to track in the field, all other risk measures considered underestimate the rise of risk with rise in mean annual temperature. The measure coming closest was “degree days above zero.” Disease prevalence in ticks and hosts showed less increase with rising temperature. Single field measurements at the height of transmission season did not show much change at all with rising temperature.