Test: To Fight Tick-Borne Disease, Someone Has To Catch Ticks

Saturday, February 23, 2013

To Fight Tick-Borne Disease, Someone Has To Catch Ticks | Essentials

To Fight Tick-Borne Disease, Someone Has To Catch Ticks

Deer Tick, Female (Ixodes scapularis) by wackybadger
License (according to Flickr): Attribution-ShareAlike License

Excerpt:

Last year Tom Mather caught 15,000 deer ticks in the woods of southern Rhode Island. "People really need to become tick literate," the College of Rhode Island researcher says. Last year Tom Mather caught 15,000 deer ticks in the woods of southern Rhode Island. "People really need to become tick literate," the University of Rhode Island researcher says. Brian Mullen for NPR

He searches for deer ticks-- poppy seed-sized skin burrowers-- in the woods of southern Rhode Island. These are the teeny-tiny carriers of Lyme disease, an ailment that can lead to signs ranging from nasty rashes to memory loss. Mather's not having much difficulty discovering deer ticks. In fact, he just might be the very best deer tick collector in the nation. He caught 15,000 of them last year. His success suggests a growing trouble.

Concepts:

People:

Tom Mather

Overall Sentiment: 0.0529928

Relevance: 0.90198

Sentiment	Quote
-0.0661411	"You know. I can hold eight to 10 in my fingers and do it that way," Mather says. ...
-0.0645564	"You know. I can hold eight to 10 in my fingers and do it that way," Mather says. "If there is more than that, usually I will sort of touch the branch to my thigh and let the ticks crawl up on my leg and then I have a couple seconds to pick them before they start walking away."
0.0539653	"This wouldn't be the job that most people would want — walking through the brush getting pricked and latched onto by ticks at the same time," Mather says, ...
0.0814701	"This wouldn't be the job that most people would want — walking through the brush getting pricked and latched onto by ticks at the same time," Mather says, laughing. "I think it's great."
0	"When we bring the ticks back in from the field we just keep them in the refrigerator," he says. ...
0	"People really need to become tick literate," he says. ...
-0.163811	"People really need to become tick literate," he says. "When not so many people got sick it seemed like less of an issue. When more people get sick... you need to know more about the situation."
0	"I feel that research has to be done for a purpose," he says. ...
0.0631741	"I feel that research has to be done for a purpose," he says. "And the purpose is to protect people. In this case, protect people from being bitten and getting a disease, or several diseases."
Sentiment Stats:	Number of Quotes: 9 Aggregate Sentiment: -0.095899 Mean: -0.010655444444444 Standard Deviation: 0

Disambiguation: References:

Brian Mullen

Overall Sentiment: 0

Relevance: 0.183334

Disambiguation: Athlete | HockeyPlayerReferences:

Key:

Aggregate Sentiment is meant to be an indicator of an individual's overall sentiment.
The Mean is meant to be an indicator of an individual's average comment sentiment.
The Standard Deviation, when there are enough quotes, will indicate an individual's consistency of sentiment (i.e. a Standard Deviation of 0 would mean they were very consistent in their sentiment and 1 would mean they were very inconsistent).

Note that quote stats are likely to be meaningless beyond the aggregate score due to the tiny sample size. However, they are always provided just in case you find something useful there.

Additional Info:

HealthCondition: Lyme disease

Overall Sentiment: -0.173317

Relevance: 0.415201

Disambiguation: DiseaseOrMedicalCondition | DiseaseCause | InfectiousDisease | DiseaseReferences:

StateOrCounty: Rhode Island

Overall Sentiment: 0

Relevance: 0.375881

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