Tick–borne diseases risk assessment in Europe.

Risk pre-assessment for vector borne diseases is essential for the identification of targeted vector and disease control actions. This is particularly important when assessing public health risk for newly emerging pathogens as those transmitted by the tick Ixodes ricinus under a global change scenario. Here I present the spatio-temporal distribution of 8037 questing ticks (nymphs and adults) collected by EDENext TBD partners during 2012 (4149 in Germany, 1917 in Slovakia, 966 in Italy, 790 in Hungary, 215 in Czech Republic). Comparisons of Ixodes ricinus abundance in each of the study sites have been focused at this stage mainly on nymphs, which represent the most important developmental stage of relevance for public health risk assessment. The number of nymphs collected in Hungary, Italy and Czech Republic are significantly less than those collected in Germany while in Slovakia questing ticks seems to be more than in Germany even though the difference is not significant. With respect to habitat types questing ticks are more abundant in natural sites compared to agricultural and urban sites. Finally, questing ticks are less abundant in 2012 with respect to those collected in 2011. However, it has to be remarked that the effect of both habitat type and year is not the same in all countries. In fact the model that includes interaction terms shows a significant effect of both country: habitat type and country: year