Courtesy of Olivia Goodreau
Olivia working with scientist Dr. Ying Zhang in the lab at Johns Hopkins University.
Olivia Goodreau's family visits the Lake of the Ozarks every summer. The Colorado natives have been making the trek since Goodreau's grandmother was 14. But when Goodreau was 6 years old exploring the lake's surrounding outdoors, a tick encounter forever changed her life.
"I was outside catching fireflies and just being a kid. I didn't know I had a tick on me," Goodreau, now 14, says. "I never saw the bull's-eye rash. I didn't have one. I didn't have any symptoms until a few weeks later."
But when she returned home to begin second grade, Goodreau felt sick, like she had come down with the flu, experiencing body aches, brain fog, headaches, tremors in her right hand, and blackouts. She thought she'd caught something at school. But it began to worsen. "Over the course of 18 months I saw 51 doctors—all from Colorado—to be just diagnosed with Lyme disease," she says. In another three years and four more doctors, Goodreau was diagnosed with four additional diseases as a result of the tick bite.
She went on to create the LivLyme Foundation after hearing a story about a mom and son living in a car in order to pay for the son's Lyme disease medication. "Out of all of the stories I heard previously, that one really stuck with me," she says. "I realized that I just couldn't sit around doing nothing while other people were suffering much worse than I am."
The foundation's two goals are to help children who cannot afford their Lyme disease medication, in case insurance companies refuse to serve children who have the disease and to help fund scientific research for cures and better treatments. The foundation has already given four grants to Stanford University, John Hopkins, and the University of New Haven. "I definitely think that if they get the funding they need, we will see treatments and potentially a cure in the near future," Goodreau says.
From here, she wants to explore more opportunities for donations to provide more grants and funding to both scientists kids in need and, adding to the 31 grants they currently provide children over the United States ages 5–21. Her other main goal? Awareness.
Just two years ago, while visiting Lake of the Ozarks again, Goodreau found about 200 poppy seed–size ticks on her dog Mo (short for 'Missouri') during a walk through the woods. She hurried to get rid of all of the ticks. She wondered: "Is there an app or website where we can see what kinds of tickets these might be? Or what ticks are in the area?" Once home she and her family did the research. There was no app or website yet in existence. With an idea in place, she needed to find people who knew how to construct an app. Enter Goodreau's great uncle who introduced her to an app developing group. Together with her parents, she and the group spent eight months creating the application TickTracker. Now, Microsoft has given the foundation a grant to help develop AI that help identify ticks right after user upload pictures of what the insects they're encountering. She has plans to develop technology that can track tick migration and outbreaks. Currently, the app allows users to track and report ticks in real-time.
"That's how we're going to protect everyone," she says, "so they don't end up like me."
