Case Study - Lyme Disease Occurrence

Lyme disease is caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdoferi and is transmitted to humans through the bite of infected blacklegged ticks. Typical symptoms include fever, headache, and fatigue. If left untreated, infection can spread to joints, the heart, and the nervous system.

Ticks require one blood-meal in each phase of their life cycle, transitioning from larvae to nymphs to adults. All tick stages can feed on birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals, although nymphs and adults tend to be the stages that bite larger mammals. Ticks pick up the bacterium B. burgdoferi from hosts and become carriers that can transmit the disease to any of their subsequent hosts.

Lyme disease is prevalent on the east coast, but it has started appearing in ticks on the west coast as well. On the east coast, ticks' main host are deer and small rodents, whereas on the west coast ticks feed mostly on Western Fence Lizards as well as small rodents, and deer.

Researchers went out and collected nymph and adult stages of black-legged ticks from multiple random locations in California and from New York and had them tested to see if the ticks were carriers of B. burgdoferi. The counts for the nymph stage are below:

	Infected	Not Infected
CA	12	114
NY	48	133

1)What is the proportion of nymphs in CA among infected nymphs? Record your proportion to three decimal places. (x denotes the frequency and n the sample size from which you are calculating the proportion and should be whole number values.)

Symbol	Value
x : n	:
proportion

2) What is the proportion of nymphs in New York that are infected? Record your proportion to three decimal places.(xdenotes the frequency andn the sample size from which you are calculating the proportion and should be whole number values.)

Symbol	Value
x : n	:
proportion