Evolutionary adaptation under climate change: sp. demonstrates potential to adapt to warming.

Climate warming is expected to shift the distributions of mosquitoes and mosquito-borne diseases, promoting expansions at cool range edges and contractions at warm range edges. However, whether mosquito populations could maintain their warm edges through evolutionary adaptation remains unknown. Here, we investigate the potential for thermal adaptation in , a congener of the major disease vector species that experiences large thermal gradients in its native range, by assaying tolerance to prolonged and acute heat exposure, and its genetic basis in a diverse, field-derived population.

Mobility and non-household environments: understanding dengue transmission patterns in urban contexts.

Background: Households (HH) have been traditionally described as the main environments where people are at risk of dengue (and other arbovirus) infection. Mounting entomological evidence has suggested a larger role of environments other than HH in transmission. Recently, an agent-based model (ABM) estimated that over half of infections occur in non-household (NH) environments like workplaces, markets, and recreational sites.

Associations between weather and malaria in an elimination setting in Peru: a distributed lag analysis.

Background: () is the predominant malaria species in countries approaching elimination. In the context of climate change, understanding environmental drivers of transmission can guide interventions, yet evidence is limited, particularly in Latin America.

Objectives: We estimated the association between temperature and precipitation and malaria incidence in a malaria elimination setting in Peru.

How Much Warming Can Mosquito Vectors Tolerate?

Climate warming is expected to substantially impact the global landscape of mosquito-borne disease, but these impacts will vary across disease systems and regions. Understanding which diseases, and where within their distributions, these impacts are most likely to occur is critical for preparing public health interventions. While research has centered on potential warming-driven expansions in vector transmission, less is known about the potential for vectors to experience warming-driven stress or even local extirpations.

Highway paving dramatically increased dengue transmission in the Amazon.

Human mobility drives the spread of many infectious diseases, yet the health impacts of changes in mobility due to new infrastructure development are poorly understood and currently not accounted for in impact assessments. We take a novel quasi-experimental approach to identifying the link between mobility and infectious disease, leveraging historical road upgrades as a proxy for regional human mobility changes. We analyzed how highway paving altered transmission of dengue-a high-burden mosquito-borne disease-via changes in human movement in the Madre de Dios region of Peru.

Extreme precipitation, exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change, drove Peru's record-breaking 2023 dengue outbreak.

Anthropogenic forcing is increasing the likelihood and severity of certain extreme weather events, which may catalyze outbreaks of climate-sensitive infectious diseases. Extreme precipitation events can promote the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses by creating vector habitat, destroying infrastructure, and impeding vector control. Here, we focus on Cyclone Yaku, which caused heavy rainfall in northwestern Peru from March 7th - 20th, 2023 and was followed by the worst dengue outbreak in Peru's history.

Temperature dependence of mosquitoes: Comparing mechanistic and machine learning approaches.

Mosquito vectors of pathogens (e.g., Aedes, Anopheles, and Culex spp.

Molecular epidemiology and evolutionary characteristics of dengue virus 2 in East Africa.

Despite the increasing burden of dengue, the regional emergence of the virus in Kenya has not been examined. This study investigates the genetic structure and regional spread of dengue virus-2 in Kenya. Viral RNA from acutely ill patients in Kenya was enriched and sequenced.

Evolutionary adaptation under climate change: sp. demonstrates potential to adapt to warming.

Climate warming is expected to shift the distributions of mosquitoes and mosquito-borne diseases, facilitating expansions at cool range edges and contractions at warm range edges. However, whether mosquito populations could maintain their warm edges through evolutionary adaptation remains unknown. Here, we investigate the potential for thermal adaptation in , a congener of the major disease vector species that experiences large thermal gradients in its native range, by assaying tolerance to prolonged and acute heat exposure, and its genetic basis in a diverse, field-derived population.

A flexible model for thermal performance curves.

Temperature responses of many biological traits-including population growth, survival, and development-are described by thermal performance curves (TPCs) with phenomenological models like the Briere function or mechanistic models related to chemical kinetics. Existing TPC models are either simple but inflexible in shape, or flexible yet difficult to interpret in biological terms. Here we present flexTPC: a model that is parameterized exclusively in terms of biologically interpretable quantities, including the thermal minimum, optimum, and maximum, and the maximum trait value.

Species distribution modeling for disease ecology: A multi-scale case study for schistosomiasis host snails in Brazil.

Species distribution models (SDMs) are increasingly popular tools for profiling disease risk in ecology, particularly for infectious diseases of public health importance that include an obligate non-human host in their transmission cycle. SDMs can create high-resolution maps of host distribution across geographical scales, reflecting baseline risk of disease. However, as SDM computational methods have rapidly expanded, there are many outstanding methodological questions.

Plasticity in mosquito size and thermal tolerance across a latitudinal climate gradient.

Variation in heat tolerance among populations can determine whether a species is able to cope with ongoing climate change. Such variation may be especially important for ectotherms whose body temperatures, and consequently, physiological processes, are regulated by external conditions. Additionally, differences in body size are often associated with latitudinal clines, thought to be driven by climate gradients.

A Mosquito Parasite Is Locally Adapted to Its Host but Not Temperature.

AbstractClimate change will alter interactions between parasites and their hosts. Warming may affect patterns of local adaptation, shifting the environment to favor the parasite or host and thus changing the prevalence of disease. We assessed local adaptation to hosts and temperature in the facultative ciliate parasite , which infects the western tree hole mosquito .

Climate and urbanization drive changes in the habitat suitability of Schistosoma mansoni competent snails in Brazil.

Schistosomiasis is a neglected tropical disease caused by Schistosoma parasites. Schistosoma are obligate parasites of freshwater Biomphalaria and Bulinus snails, thus controlling snail populations is critical to reducing transmission risk. As snails are sensitive to environmental conditions, we expect their distribution is significantly impacted by global change.

Re-assessing thermal response of schistosomiasis transmission risk: evidence for a higher thermal optimum than previously predicted.

The geographical range of schistosomiasis is affected by the ecology of schistosome parasites and their obligate host snails, including their response to temperature. Previous models predicted schistosomiasis' thermal optimum at 21.7 °C, which is not compatible with the temperature in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) regions where schistosomiasis is hyperendemic.

Investigating the Yanomami malaria outbreak puzzle: surge in mining during Bolsonaro's government triggered peak in malaria burden.

The Yanomami, an Indigenous people from the Amazon, confront multifaceted challenges endangering their health and cultural integrity. Of immediate concern is the surge in malaria cases in their territory during Bolsonaro's government. We investigated the impact of land use on malaria incidence among the Yanomami leveraging satellite imagery and ran difference-in-differences analyses to ask whether the Yanomami suffered disproportionately from malaria when illegal mining was rising in the region (2016-2022).

Interconnecting global threats: climate change, biodiversity loss, and infectious diseases.

The concurrent pressures of rising global temperatures, rates and incidence of species decline, and emergence of infectious diseases represent an unprecedented planetary crisis. Intergovernmental reports have drawn focus to the escalating climate and biodiversity crises and the connections between them, but interactions among all three pressures have been largely overlooked. Non-linearities and dampening and reinforcing interactions among pressures make considering interconnections essential to anticipating planetary challenges.

Local tree cover predicts mosquito species richness and disease vector presence in a tropical countryside landscape.

Context: Land use change drives both biodiversity loss and zoonotic disease transmission in tropical countryside landscapes. Developing solutions for protecting countryside biodiversity, public health, and livelihoods requires understanding the scales at which habitat characteristics such as land cover shape biodiversity, especially for arthropods that transmit pathogens. Evidence increasingly shows that species richness for many taxa correlates with local tree cover.

Perceived experts are prevalent and influential within an antivaccine community on Twitter.

Perceived experts (i.e. medical professionals and biomedical scientists) are trusted sources of medical information who are especially effective at encouraging vaccine uptake.

Climate warming is expanding dengue burden in the Americas and Asia.

Climate change poses significant threats to public health, with dengue representing a growing concern due to its high existing burden and sensitivity to climatic conditions. Yet, the quantitative impacts of temperature warming on dengue, both in the past and in the future, remain poorly understood. In this study, we quantify how dengue responds to climatic fluctuations, and use this inferred temperature response to estimate the impacts of historical warming and forecast trends under future climate change scenarios.

Non-household environments make a major contribution to dengue transmission: Implications for vector control.

The incidence of Aedes-borne pathogens has been increasing despite vector control efforts. Control strategies typically target households, where Aedes mosquitoes breed in household containers and bite indoors. However, our study in Kenyan cities Kisumu and Ukunda (2019-2022) reveals high Aedes abundance in public spaces, prompting the question: how important are non-household (NH) environments for dengue transmission and control? Using field data and human activity patterns, we developed an agent-based model simulating transmission across household (HH) and five NH environments, which was then used to evaluate preventive (before an epidemic) and reactive (after an epidemic commences) vector control scenarios.

Climate and urbanization drive changes in the habitat suitability of competent snails in Brazil.

Schistosomiasis is a neglected tropical disease caused by parasites. are obligate parasites of freshwater snails, so controlling snail populations is critical to reducing transmission risk. As snails are sensitive to environmental conditions, we expect their distribution is significantly impacted by global change.