Project 460740

Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases (TBD) are an emerging public health threat in Canada. Although ticks are often associated with forested areas, urban and peri-urban exposure are frequently thought to be the source of tick exposure for LD cases, particularly in municipalities where private yards are bordered by forests or where municipal parks host significant populations of deer and rodents. Healthy Cities benefit from greening public and private spaces and promoting access to green spaces. However, in some urban and periurban settings, green spaces may be associated with LD risk, which may induce significant psychological stress and may limit outdoors activities. Hence, risk mitigation strategies that maximize the benefits of spending time in vegetated areas while reducing TBD risk are required for urban and peri-urban settings. Various interventions have been developed in the last two decades to reduce the risk of human encounter with B. burgdorferi infected questing ticks. However, few of these interventions have demonstrated consistent effectiveness at reducing the risk of tick exposure in humans or the risk of Lyme disease and even fewer are considered efficient, feasible and socially acceptable. Citizens or municipal authorities may find some interventions hard to implement or resource-intensive and the sustainability of such interventions is thus questionable if the requirements of local day-to-day management are not considered in the development phases of interventions. We thus propose to create a network of researchers and empowered municipal end-user stakeholders and citizens to codevelop, based on the best scientific knowledge available on LD risk management, locally adapted integrated interventions that could eventually be supported by urban or peri-urban communities. This work will support the development of the network and evidence-informed risk reduction strategies for urban and peri-urban communities in Canada.