Tuesday, December 10, 2013

URI tick fighters ask for your support

Just one tick can change a life.
“By helping prevent tick bites, you can help change the lives of hundreds.”
By Lafleche Giasson

300,000… that’s the number of new cases of Lyme disease contracted each year…and that’s just Lyme disease. In North America alone, did you know that ticks can transmit more than 10 other serious infections also capable of destroying peoples’ lives.

The TickEncounter Resource Center at the University of Rhode Island is a national leader in promoting tick-bite protection and tickborne disease prevention by engaging, educating, and empowering people to take action. 


We're on the move forward, working every day to raise tick literacy and influence best tick bite protection practices; helping insure that more and more people take appropriate, effective action before and after a tick bite.  Our goal is to provide the information you need to know, empowering you to keep yourself and your loved ones as TickSafe as possible. 

But all of these efforts cost money. The sequester, the government shutdown, and budgetary uncertainty at our key federal funding agencies have had a collective negative impact on our budget, and on our ability to deliver the programs and support that hundreds of thousands of people use each year. There's never been a more critical time in the life of TickEncounter for private philanthropy. 

With a little generosity, you can be the reason that TickEncounter is able to provide the nation with the best seasonally and geographically relevant tick information available.  We ask you to click on the orange tick at the top of your favorite TickEncounter feature and help the TickEncounter Resource Center continue to link the best in tick science with peoples’ lived experiences.

Your donation will be put to work supporting ongoing activities as well as sponsoring development of new features, like an improved Tick Identification Guide, helping users id ticks like TickEncounter Tick pros. Our new crowd-sourced TickSpotters program  is engaging thousands of new users who probably used to just think that ticks were ticks, and they would just pluck them off and throw them away. 

Now, you and they are becoming citizen scientists -- active fighters in the TickWars -- the tick resource in your family, circle of friends, community. And TickEncounter wants to keep your tick tools honed and at the ready for you when you need them.