A systematic review of the effectiveness and utility of Lyme disease prevention measures in Canada, the United States, and Europe
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: This systematic review aimed to assess the effectiveness of interventions which reduce human-tick encounters, prevent tick bites, and reduce the risk of Borrelia burgdorferi transmission, and to evaluate knowledge on the cost, environmental impact, social impact and acceptability, and public health impact of these interventions. METHODS: The search was conducted in Medline, Embase, Global Health, CAB Abstracts, Cochrane CENTRAL, Scopus, and Econlit for relevant literature in March 2022 and was updated in November 2024 and followed PRISMA guidelines for systematic reviews. Inclusion was applied at citation and full text, after which articles were assessed for risk of bias and data was extracted by two independent reviewers. Studies were summarized by intervention type (landscape management, host animal parasitism and movement, chemical/natural/botanical applications, personal protection) and a multi-study synthesis of tick suppression effects was conducted for interventions that reported the density of infected nymphs as the primary outcome. RESULTS: One hundred and twenty-seven studies published between 1977 and 2024 were included in this systematic review. Most studies (n = 62) were classified as host-targeted interventions. Twenty-five studies were included in the multi-study synthesis of tick suppression effects, which suggested that chemical tick control methods are the most effective and consistent intervention type with 93.8% mean suppression of questing nymphs. CONCLUSION: While some strategies such as chemical acaricides were shown to have greater effectiveness, factors such as social acceptability and resistance, environmental impact, cost, and feasibility should be considered when selecting the most appropriate intervention to maximize the utility of the intervention.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".