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Updated: Jun 1, 2026

Feeding of Ticks on Animals for Transmission and Xenodiagnosis in Lyme Disease Research
Published on: August 31, 2013
Preliminary analysis of an agent-based model for a tick-borne disease
1Department of Biological Sciences, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23529, United States. hgaff@odu.edu
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Ticks have a unique life history including a distinct set of life stages and a single blood meal per life stage. This makes tick-host interactions more complex from a mathematical perspective. In addition, any model of these interactions must involve a significant degree of stochasticity on the individual tick level. In an attempt to quantify these relationships, I have developed an individual-based model of the interactions between ticks and their hosts as well as the transmission of tick-borne disease between the two populations. The results from this model are compared with those from previously published differential equation based population models. The findings show that the agent-based model produces significantly lower prevalence of disease in both the ticks and their hosts than what is predicted by a similar differential equation model.
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