Malaria infection rates in Anopheles albimanus (Diptera: Culicidae) at Ipet í-Guna, a village within a region targeted for malaria elimination in Panamá.

Malaria infection rates in Anopheles albimanus (Diptera: Culicidae) at Ipetí-Guna, a village within a region targeted for malaria elimination in Panamá. Infect Genet Evol. 2019 Feb 04;: Authors: Rigg CA, Hurtado LA, Calzada JE, Chaves LF Abstract The Panamá Canal construction encompassed one of the first examples of malaria elimination. Nevertheless, malaria has uninterruptedly persisted in Native American populations living within a few kilometers of the Panamá Canal. Here, we present results from a monthly longitudinal study (May 2016 to March 2018), whose goal was to quantitatively describe seasonal patterns of Plasmodium spp. infection in Anopheles albimanus Wiedemann, and its association with environmental covariates, at Ipetí-Guna, a village within a region targeted for malaria elimination in Panamá. To detect Plasmodium spp. infections we employed a standard nested PCR on DNA extracts from mosquito pools of varying size, which were then used to estimate monthly infection rates using a maximum likelihood method. The infection rate estimates (IR) were analyzed using time series analysis methods to study their association with changes in rainfall, temperature, NDVI (a satellite derived vegetation index) and human biting rates (HBR). We found that mosquitoes were infected by Plasmodium vivax mainly from September to December, reaching a peak in December. Time series modeling showed malaria IR in An albimanus increased, simul...
Source: Infection, Genetics and Evolution - Category: Genetics & Stem Cells Authors: Tags: Infect Genet Evol Source Type: research