Teen Creates App To Track Ticks After Contracting Lyme Disease In Missouri

[Sherman A1]

Olivia Goodreau is trying to help other people avoid what happened to her: Lyme disease.

Goodreau partnered with thePLAN, a software company in central Ohio, to develop TickTracker, a free smartphone app that lets users log the types of ticks they see and where they found them using geolocation. The ticks are displayed on a map.

“I hope that it will bring awareness to everyone so they don’t end up like me and they don’t end up with a bunch of diseases,” Goodreau said.

The summer before she started second grade, Goodreau and her family traveled from their home in Colorado to Lake of the Ozarks. There, she said, she was bitten by a tick she didn’t see. She didn’t have the typical “bull’s-eye” rash, either, which appears in about half of patients eventually diagnosed with Lyme disease.

https://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/teen-creates-app-track-ticks-after-contracting-lyme-disease-missouri

[royable]

1. Wouldn't work too well in central Maine, where there seem to be about a hundred per square yard.

Walk down a mowed road through the woods, get ticks. Mow the lawn, get ticks. Walk across the lawn to the clothesline and back, get ticks. Work in the garden, get ticks. Pet your cat, get ticks.

Last winter a relative in Maine posted shared photos that he took of moose tracks through the snow hear his home, with ticks that had fallen off the moose lying all over the snow.

It's really becoming unlivable there.