Abstract
Brazil reported the majority of the dengue cases in Americas during the last two decades, where the occurrence of human dengue cases is exclusively attributed to the Aedes (Stegomyia) aegypti (Linnaeus). Nowadays, other recognized Dengue virus (DENV) vector in Asian countries, Aedes (Stegomyia) albopictus (Skuse), has been detected in more than half of the 5565 Brazilian municipalities. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to investigate the presence of, and determine the Ae. albopictus’ dynamics influenced by spatiotemporal characteristics in a dengue-endemic risk city of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais State’s capital. Aedes albopictus were collected across four consecutive DENV transmission seasons from 2010 to 2014. These mosquitoes were caught in three selected districts, which had been reported in the previous ten years as having high mosquito densities and an elevated concentration of human dengue cases during epidemic seasons. All field-caught Ae. albopictus was individually processed by real-time RT-PCR, to research the DENV presence. The third season (p<0.05) and the Pampulha district (p<0.05) had the highest proportions of field-caught Ae. albopictus, respectively. The second season had the highest proportion of DENV-infected field-caught females (p<0.05), but there was no difference among the proportions of DENV-infected Ae. albopictus when comparing the collection in the three districts (p=0.98). Minimum (p=0.004) and maximum (p<0.0001) temperature were correlated with the field-caught Ae. albopictus in four different periods and districts. In the generalized linear model of Poisson, the field-caught DENV-infected Ae. albopictus (p=0.005), East district (p=0.003), minimum temperature (p<0.0001) and relative humidity (p=0.001) remained associated with the total number of human dengue cases. Our study demonstrated that the number of field-caught DENV-infected Ae. albopictus was inversed correlated with the number of human dengue cases. Our study raises the possibility that the DENV circulating in mosquitoes Ae. albopictus is happening in non-epidemic periods, showing that this species may be keeping only the presence of the virus in nature. Further long-term studies are necessary to better understand the role of Ae. albopictus in DENV transmission and or its vectorial competence in Belo Horizonte and in other endemic cities in Brazil and in the New World countries.
Highlights
IntroductionJ.M.T. Bezerra et al / Acta Tropica 164 (2016) 431–437 dengue each year and, about 500,000 of them are hospitalized with dengue hemorrhagic fever, the severe form of the disease
Dengue virus (DENV) transmission has been reported in all 27 Brazilian states (MS, 2015)
The dengue virus (DENV) transmission season occurs in the summer and is typified by high relative humidity near to 65.0% with most of the average annual rainfall of approximately 1500 mm falling between October and March (INMET, 2016)
Summary
J.M.T. Bezerra et al / Acta Tropica 164 (2016) 431–437 dengue each year and, about 500,000 of them are hospitalized with dengue hemorrhagic fever, the severe form of the disease. The annual average of dengue cases reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) has increased dramatically. In 2013, countries in the Americas reported more than 2.3 million cases of dengue, with 37,692 cases of severe dengue and 1280 deaths, resulting in a mortality rate of about 0.05% (PAHO, 2014; WHO, 2014). The focus of this study was the endemic city of Belo Horizonte, capital of Minas Gerais State, located in southeast Brazil. Belo Horizonte has approximately 2.3 million inhabitants. In 1996, the first dengue cases were confirmed in the southeastern city of Belo Horizonte. The recent and worst dengue epidemic in the city history was 2013 with 89,213 cases reported (, 2015)
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