Abstract
Tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) is the most common viral tick-borne disease in Europe causing thousands of human infections every year. Available risk maps in Europe are solely based on human incidences, but often underestimate areas with TBE virus circulation as shown by several autochthonous cases detected outside known risk areas. A dataset of more than 1300 georeferenced TBE virus detections in ticks and mammals except for humans was compiled and used to estimate the probability of TBE virus presence in Europe. For this, a random forests model was implemented using temperature- and precipitation-dependent bioclimatic variables of the WorldClim dataset, altitude, as well as land cover of the ESA GlobCover dataset. The highest probabilities of TBE virus presence were identified in Central Europe, in the south of the Nordic countries, and in the Baltic countries. The model performance was evaluated by an out-of-bag error (OOB) of 0.174 and a high area under the curve value (AUC) of 0.905. The TBE virus presence maps may subsequently be used to estimate the risk of TBE virus infections in humans and can support decision-makers to identify TBE risk areas and to encourage people to take appropriate actions against tick bites and TBE virus infections.
Highlights
In Europe, tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) is the most common viral tick-borne disease of the central nervous system
The comparability of detection methods is discussed controversially regarding the reliability of on-going TBE virus circulation [23], all of them were included in the dataset as a qualitative virus present/absent decision, which is of main interest here rather than a quantitative indication of prevalence
Focusing on the main endemic area in Europe, 889 locations with TBE virus detections in endothermic mammals and 444 locations with detections in ticks were taken from of a total of 133 publications
Summary
In Europe, tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) is the most common viral tick-borne disease of the central nervous system. The causative agent, the TBE virus, is transmitted to humans mainly by the widespread tick species Ixodes ricinus, but it may be acquired via consumption of infected unpasteurized dairy products [1]. In the European Union, around 3000 human TBE cases are reported annually [2]. It is estimated that these are one-third of all TBE virus infections, which manifested in severe clinical neurological conditions and laboratory confirmed. The other two-thirds of human TBE virus infections remain asymptomatic or have mild-clinical symptoms [2]. More detailed information on pathogenesis, clinical picture, case definition, and other interesting aspects are reviewed by Ružek et al [3] recently
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