Data for Methods of active surveillance for hard ticks and associated tick-borne pathogens of public health importance in the contiguous United States: A Comprehensive Systematic Review

These are the datasets underlying the figures in the manuscript "Methods of active surveillance for hard ticks and associated tick-borne pathogens of public health importance in the contiguous United States: A Comprehensive Systematic Review".

The review considered only publications reporting on active tick or tick-borne pathogen surveillance in the contiguous United States published between 1944 and 2018. For the purposes of this review, we were only concerned with studies of Ixodidae (hard ticks) and/or studies of tick-borne pathogens (in humans, animals, or hard ticks) of public health importance to humans. Study designs included cross-sectional, serological, epidemiological, ecological, or observational studies. Only peer-reviewed publications published in the English language were included. Studies were excluded if they focused on a tick that is not a vector of a human pathogen or on a pathogen that does not cause disease in humans, if the tick or tick-borne pathogen findings were incidental, or if they did not include quantitative surveillance data. For the purpose of this study, we defined surveillance data as information on ticks or pathogens provided through active sampling in natural areas; it should be noted that this does not match the strict definition used by the CDC, which requires sustained sampling efforts across time. Studies were also excluded if they: explored regions other than the contiguous US; focused on treatment, vaccine, or therapeutics development and/or diagnostics of human disease; focused on tick or pathogen genetics; focused on experimental studies with ticks or hosts; were tick control and/or management studies; performed only passive surveillance; were review articles; were not peer reviewed; were in a language other than English; the full text was not available; and if the disease was not a risk to the general public. In addition, for articles which reported data that had previously been published, we only included previously unreported information collected by the authors, and we referenced the specific period of collection for these data to ensure we were not double-recording data. Due to publication delays, we also performed a non-systematic review of the literature of articles published between 2019 – 2023 on tick and tickborne pathogen surveillance methods conducted in the contiguous United States.

Keyword search was performed in PubMed Central and Web of Science Core Collection databases. The search algorithm keywords included tick(s), Amblyomma, Dermacentor, Ixodes, Rhipicephalus, Acari Ixodidea, tick host(s), Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Spotted Fever Group, Rickettsiosis, Ehrlichiosis, Anaplasmosis, Borreliosis, Tularemia, Babesiosis, tick-borne pathogen, Powassan, Heartland, Bourbon, Colorado tick fever, Pacific Coast tick fever, tick surveillance, surveillance, (sero)epidemiology, prevalence, distribution, ecology, United States. The search algorithm utilized is provided as follows:
TI= ((ticks OR Ixodes OR Amblyomma OR Dermacentor OR Rhipicephalus OR "Acari Ixodidi" OR "tick hosts" OR "tick host") OR ("Lyme Disease" OR "Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever" OR "Spotted Fever Group" OR Rickettsiosis OR Rickettsial OR Ehrlichiosis OR Anaplasmosis OR Borreliosis OR Tularemia OR Babesiosis OR Borrelia OR Ehrlichia OR Anaplasma OR Rickettsia OR Babesia OR "tick-borne pathogen" OR "tick borne pathogen")) AND TS= ("tick surveillance" OR surveillance OR epidemiology OR seroepidemiology OR ecology) AND CU=("United States of America" OR "USA" OR "United States" OR United-States).

These datasets are the collated data underlying the figures in the manuscript. For more details, please see the publication.

The following are explanations for variables used in all the CSV files:
Tick: Species of tick collected
Tick_Method: Method of collecting ticks
Pathogen: Species of pathogen tested for
Path_Method: Method of testing for pathogens
Decade: Decade of publication
n: Number of publications
STATE: state in which study was conducted
COUNTY: county in which study was conducted
1944 - 2018 (Was surveillance performed?): was there at least one publication included with a publication date within the 1944-2018 period in this geographic region?
2019 - 2023 (Was surveillance performed?): was there at least one publication included with a publication date within the 2019-2023 period in this geographic region?