From Albrightsville to Zehners and everywhere in between, folks are able to check on the risk of ticks in their hometowns.

TickZone, a free online tool that reports daily tick activity, was launched just in time for peak tick season.

“I put the site up this summer,” explained TickZone founder Nathan Burnett. “It started in the Northeast and now covers the whole country — 32,386 towns across all 50 states and Washington, D.C.”

People simply visit TickZone.app and enter their location to check the activity of ticks, which can spread a host of illnesses, including Lyme disease, anaplasmosis and babesiosis. It is a more precise picture than searching by entire county or state.

“Every town gets its own score from 0 to 100, updated every morning, alongside a 7-day outlook and a plain explanation of what is driving the number that day, whether that is the season, the weather or the habitat around the town,” Burnett said.

For example, a recent search of the more urban Lehighton borough reported a 27 on the scale, or low risk, while a search of the heavily wooded Penn Forest Township revealed a 56, or moderate risk.

“The part that tends to surprise people is how much the picture changes between neighboring towns. Two towns 10 minutes apart can sit well apart on the scale, and it is usually habitat that separates them,” Burnett explained.

That’s because, he said, forest cover in places like Carbon County can run from about a third of a municipality’s land to nearly all of it.

“How broken up that forest is matters as much as how much there is, because the boundary where woods meet yards and fields is where people actually encounter ticks,” Burnett said. “That is the level of detail I wanted people to be able to check for their own town rather than their state.”

TickZone also reports what species are active.

In Penn Forest, for example, “deer tick nymphs are at their peak alongside dog tick adults. Midsummer is the busiest stretch: nymph deer ticks peak in the woods while American dog tick adults are active in grass and along trails.”

TickZone provides information on which tick species are in specific counties and what diseases they have tested positive for, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

“In Carbon County, that is the deer tick and the American dog tick, and the pathogens found in ticks tested locally are Lyme disease, babesiosis and Borrelia miyamotoi,” he said.

Burnett cautioned that if a tick isn’t listed, it doesn’t necessarily mean that isn’t there — it just means that there is no CDC record of it in that county.

“The lone star tick is where that matters most. CDC has no record for Carbon County, but it has one for Lehigh County next door — and for 19 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties. State surveillance puts it mostly in southern Pennsylvania so far, and it has been moving north for years,” Burnett said.

A bite from a lone star tick can cause alpha-gal syndrome, a serious food allergy to red meat, pork, lamb and dairy.

“I would read its absence from the Carbon record as nobody having collected one there yet rather than proof there are none,” Burnett said.

After all, he said, ticks are known to migrate and are turning up in places where they were not spotted a decade ago.

Burnett created the site to make it easy for folks to easily find out of it is a “bad tick day” where they live. Finding the answer, he said, previously meant checking CDC surveillance files, satellite land cover data and weather models — something he guessed the average person wouldn’t bother doing.

“Tick information was published at the state level, sometimes the county level, but never for a specific town,” he said. “That gap is what I wanted to close.”

While TickZone and its sister iPhone app cover all 50 states, Burnett noted that Pennsylvania’s reported tick-borne illness numbers are among the highest.

“Forty-four of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties report at least 100 Lyme cases per 100,000 people a year. The median Pennsylvania county reports about 135, while the median American county reports none at all,” he noted.

Burnett, who is based in Massachusetts, stressed that TickZone is an exposure model that estimates where tick encounters are likely — not where infections will occur.