You don’t have to be deep in the backwoods to be at high risk for Lyme disease.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projects that about 300,000 people are infected with Lyme disease each year, yet only 30,000 incidences are reported.

The disease spreads from a pathogen — a bacterium called Borrelia burgdorferi — to a blacklegged tick, Ixodes scapularis, also known as the “deer tick.” Ticks are in the nymphal stage of their life cycle during the late spring and summer, the stage in which they are most likely to infect humans with Lyme disease.

Rani Schoenhaus, a junior at Binghamton University, spent last summer alongside three other students collecting and testing ticks from the Susquehanna River Basin area, a nearby six-county region. “Dragging” is the process of pulling material, in this case a 1-square-meter piece of white corduroy, along terrain in order to collect ticks.

“It was a really great experience,” says Schoenhaus, a biology major from Slingerlands, N.Y. “We camped for about half of the week. We would pack into one car and hike all day, dragging different trails in a bunch of state parks and places that have high foot traffic.”

The project, which began in 2011, is headed by Ralph Garruto, a professor of anthropology at Binghamton. Garruto’s lab aims to find the rate of infected ticks, compile the demographics of people encountered in these areas and spread awareness to improve reporting rates.

“The Susquehanna River Basin area that we have been collecting ticks from has the second highest infectivity of ticks per density of ticks in the entire United States,” Schoenhaus says. “The infectivity rates of ticks with Lyme disease is actually the same as in the Hudson Valley, which has the highest infectivity rates in the U.S. They just have more reported cases.”

Results show an overall infectivity rate of 34.3 percent, meaning that about one in three ticks encountered in areas with high foot traffic were carrying the bacterium. “We’re looking at campus, neighborhood backyards, parks, places where people don’t often realize they’re at risk,” Garruto says.

Schoenhaus works on this project with doctoral student Amanda Roome, senior Zara Shah and sophomore Erik Pecina. They presented their collaborative poster and abstract at the prestigious Human Biology Association conference in April in New Orleans.

“Rani is very committed. She has worked on several teams, specifically our collection team, working more than 20 hours a week over the summer,” Garruto says. “All of the students are part of each step of the project, from collection to the DNA analysis.”

Schoenhaus’ longtime interest in epidemiology — the study of disease states and how they affect different groups of people — and other facets of public health brought her attention to this research. As part of the demographic and behavioral team, she played a critical role in collecting demographic information related to people putting themselves at risk. She looked at behavior such as who was running by, whether their arms and legs were exposed and other factors. Even areas with small green patches revealed a high density of infected ticks.

“This project is so important for public health outreach,” says Schoenhaus, who hopes to attend veterinary school. “Awareness can prevent diseases. I think people would be surprised by the density of ticks in this area first off, but the amount of ticks infected with Lyme disease is even more surprising.”

“I found a few preliminary studies that showed a correlation between chronic Lyme and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and dementia,” says Davis, now a junior majoring in integrative neuroscience. “There was some strong evidence, but they were very basic studies, mainly done by one person about 10 years ago. I felt compelled to do more research, because I wanted to understand it better.”

Working with Garruto and doctoral candidate John Darcy, Davis surveyed people whose Lyme disease had progressed from the acute stage to become a chronic condition. In the 200 surveys that have come back so far, she has seen links by sex, with women outnumbering men by about 10 percent, and between chronic Lyme and people with family histories of neurodegenerative disorders.

“There are some definite trends with symptoms of pre-neurodegenerative disease, and with a bias toward females, which is consistent with the literature,” says Davis, who expects to receive another hundred responses before analyzing the results later this semester. “I plan to look at both, and though it’s not our main focus, we’re hoping to find information that could tell us why females are more likely to get chronic Lyme than males.”

In the rest of her work on Garruto’s team, Davis talks with survey participants, maps the tick population around campus and assesses whether there are specific behaviors that increase the risk of being bitten by ticks. “Sarah is a researcher with a lot of strengths,” says Garruto, a research professor of biomedical anthropology. “She’s bright, dedicated and inquisitive, with significant experience working in the field of neurology. That’s been the central theme of her academic training and her clinical experience. Though no one can really predict at this stage, I expect Sarah to wind up in the field of neurology.”

Davis, who grew up on a farm in Greenville, N.Y., and whose mother has recovered from acute Lyme disease, estimates that she has been bitten by ticks 20 to 30 times. But that isn’t going to stop her from trying to find out more about the disease.

“I really enjoy doing this research,” she says.  “It’s different from sitting in a classroom, because I’m able to go out on my own, listen to people tell their stories and discover things through my own process.”