Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the Zoonoses in Livestock in Kenya (ZooLinK) team for collection of tick samples and Dr. Lillian Wambua (ZooLinK) for shipment of ticks to Nairobi from Busia and access to blood sample biobank and the database containing the metadata of the samples. We also acknowledge the technical contribution of Daniel O. Ouso for robotic total nucleic acid extraction, Kevin K. Ogola, Edwin K. Ogola, and the rest of the Martin Lüscher Emerging Infectious Diseases (ML-EID) laboratory team, to this work. We also acknowledge Bester Mudereri of icipe GIS and Remote Sensing unit for assistance in producing the study site map. This study received financial support from following organizations and agencies: The ZooLinK project was supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the Department for International Development, the Economic & Social Research Council, the Medical Research Council, the Natural Environment Research Council and the Defence Science & Technology Laboratory, under the Zoonoses and Emerging Livestock Systems (ZELS) programme, grant reference BB/L019019/1.  It also received support from the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH), led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). We also acknowledge the CGIAR Fund Donors (http://www.cgiar.org/funders/); the study also received support from the European Union’s Integrated Biological Control Applied Research Program (EU-IBCARP) (grant number: DCI-FOOD/2014/346-739) andicipe institutional funding from UK’s Department for International Development (DFID); Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida); the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC); Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia; and the Kenyan Government. Tatenda Chiuya was supported by a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) through the icipe ARPPIS-DAAD scholarship and through a UP postgraduate bursary. The funders had no role in the design, data collection, interpretation, or decision to submit this publication.