Concluding Thoughts
Our findings correlate with most of the literature we originally viewed.
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Comparative analysis of racial demographic data and instances of Lyme Disease in Connecticut suggests Singer and Bulled’s (2014) hypothesis on sufferers being more likely to possess racial privilege is accurate.
The interviews also showed that Singer and Bulled’s concept of ectoparsitic syndemics gels with how informants saw exurbanization and lack of cold weather as exacerbating the growth of tick numbers
Following Macauda’s (2007) use of the Health Belief Model, it was found that most informants had set ideas already about how common, severe and easy to prevent Lyme Disease is.
Additionally, unlike Mawby and Lovett’s (1998) results, the majority of informants had high health literacy on how to deal with vectors, although this is likely in part because of the non-random sampling method.
Sally claiming that you can now get a tick bite simply going to an ice cream truck in your own neighborhood resonates with Plessis’ (2017) theory on how animals can draw their own borders and destabilize the safety of humans
At least two informants talked of the reduction of forest cover as part of the problem of VBDs, tying into Dyer et al (2017) and Biehler’s (2011) research.
One informant mentioned overpopulation by deer; however, against what Biehler talks about, she did not express disgust towards such animals that may transmit ticks. She does nonetheless hint at there needing to be less exurban development and exploitation of natural resources like forest tracts if tick-borne diseases are going to be contained away from potential human victims, in accordance with what Biehler talks about.
Finally, the frustrations hinted at by Lyme Disease sufferers or relatives of sufferers in their illness narratives seem very similar to the emotions Baize-Ward (2018) was trying to help her study participants vent in poetic form, suggesting that people’s intimate experiences of VBDs may weigh heavy if not able to express them in some way.
Altogether, we hope we have offered some insight into VBDs in Connecticut – a so-called ‘epicenter’ of some of these illnesses.