BISHOP'S UNIVERSITY

Published purpose

Professional and Technical Health Services The goal of this project is to maintain and enhance a national passive surveillance system that generates standardized information on tick species and eventually on tick-borne diseases across all provinces and territories. This project will allow the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) to continue to identify the areas in which populations of Ixodes scapularis and Ixodes pacificus ticks are establishing or are expanding therefore, where Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases may pose a risk to the population. This project is achieved through a collaborative and standardized approach to the collection, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination of image-based tick surveillance data and public health messages. The objectives of this contract are to: - Maintain and enhance an existing national, population/image based, distribution passive surveillance system for tick species in Canada. -Ensure standardized and quality assured data to enable the generation of timely, comparable, Canada-wide statistics. -Create a standardized national passive testing initiative by requesting and subsampling specimens from digital submissions.