HALIFAX, Mass. — ER visits for tick bites are at their highest level since 2017, according to the CDC, and New England is one of the country’s most active Lyme disease hotspots.
In order to help people make quick decisions after discovering a tick on them, two local women teamed up to create an at-home test kit for Lyme disease.
And even though they’re tiny—ticks can cause huge health problems—that are initially tough to diagnose.
“So in kids, the symptoms for Lyme disease can be different than adults,” said Erin Dawicki, CEO and cofounder of LymeAlert. “And the tricky thing with Lyme disease is that there’s over 300 documented symptoms. So it makes it a diagnostic challenge.”
Erin Dawicki is a physician associate in Halifax and has seen her fair share of patients with Lyme disease.
“The faster you treat it, the way easier it is to treat and have complete resolution of symptoms for a lot of people,” said Dawicki. “But the second challenge is the current diagnostics we have miss 64 to 78% of early-stage cases.”
While at the MIT Sloan Fellow MBA Program, Dawicki met Michelle Ewy, and they both had the same question:
“Why can’t we test the ticks at home and give people either peace of mind or more information that they can take action on?,” said Michelle Ewy, Cofounder and senior lead scientist with LymeAlert.
The pair worked together at MIT to find a solution to that problem. Developing LymeAlert—an at-home test kit for Lyme disease—to get immediate answers as opposed to sending the tick to a lab, which takes a lot of time and money.
“What this is about is accessibility and putting the power into people’s own hands, to be able to have information about the tick they just pulled off of themselves, a child or a dog,” said Ewy.
The kit requires the tick be placed inside, the top is secured on, and then it’s twisted at least 10 times to grind the tick into tiny pieces. Then a test strip is inserted to see if the tick carried the bacteria that causes Lyme disease.
“If you find an engorged tick, it is possible that you’ve been exposed to the bacteria, whereas if you found a crawling tick, you don’t know that it didn’t bite you, but the likelihood is lower for transmission,” said Ewy.
Ewy and Dawicki say the test provides an answer within 30 minutes—a negative, which can give you peace of mind, or positive—meaning you’ll need to call your doctor. They hope these kits will not only be in people’s homes, but in the school nurse’s office and summer camps.
“And send that note home to the parents to say, your child was exposed to a pathogen, you should contact a healthcare provider,” said Dawicki. “So if we can bridge that gap, we can save a lot of people from having long consequences for life.”
A growing tick population due to warmer temperatures means Lyme disease isn’t going away—with the CDC reporting about 467,000 Lyme disease patients treated every year.
“We also think overall it builds awareness for the community, understanding that if there’s a test for a tick, for a disease, maybe that disease is kind of a big deal and you should be aware,” said Ewy.
Ewy and Dawicki are also developing an app that will have the user take a picture of their test, and it will be uploaded and geo-tagged to create a map of where negative and positive ticks are. They say this will help provide communities and public health agencies with the information they need to protect and mitigate.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.
Download the FREE Boston 25 News app for breaking news alerts.
Follow Boston 25 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch Boston 25 News NOW
©2026 Cox Media Group
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/cmg/7QOJU3BNCJERBNKJC5LWTBYFLU.png)
