La Crosse virus (LACV) is a mosquito-borne pathogen that causes more pediatric neuroinvasive disease than any other arbovirus in the United States. The geographic focus of reported LACV neuroinvasive disease (LACV-ND) expanded from the Midwest into Appalachia in the 1990s, and most cases have been reported from a few high-risk foci since then. Here, we provide the county-level LACV-ND dataset that we used to investigate changes in the distribution of geographic LACV-ND clusters between 2003 and 2021 and to investigate socioeconomic and demographic predictors of county-level disease risk in states with persistent clusters. We used spatial scan statistics to identify high-risk clusters from 2003–2021 and a generalized linear mixed model to identify socioeconomic and demographic predictors of disease risk.

We received the annual number of reported La Crosse virus neuroinvasive disease cases for each county in the United States from 2003 to 2021 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Division of Vector-Borne Diseases. This data is publicly viewable in the United States national arbovirus surveillance system, ArboNET, but a request must be submitted to receive the data in tabular form. Here, we aggregated the data into four time periods: 2003–2007, 2008–2012, 2013–2017, and 2018–2021 by summing the number of cases for each county in each time period. We also provide a period-specific estimate of the total population in the county from United States census data.