Abstract
West Nile Virus (WNV) is a mosquito-borne infection that can cause serious illness in humans. Surveillance for WNV primarily focuses on a measure of infection prevalence in the Culex spp. mosquitos, its primary vectors, known as the Minimum Infection Rate (MIR). The calculation of MIR for a given area considers the number of mosquitos tested, but not the relative effort to collect mosquitos, leading to a potential underestimation of the uncertainty around the estimate. We performed Value of Information analysis on simulated data sets including a range of mosquito trap densities in two well-studied counties in Illinois between 2005 and 2016 to determine the relative error introduced into MIR associated with changing the density of mosquito traps. We found that low trap density increases the potential for error in MIR estimation, and that it does so synergistically with low true MIR values. We propose that these results could be used to better estimate uncertainty in WNV risk.
Highlights
West Nile Virus (WNV) causes an infectious disease in birds, horses and humans that is transmitted by the bite of infected mosquitoes[1]
After randomly sampling subsets of mosquito trap data, the absolute relative error in estimated Minimum Infection Rate (MIR) for a acosuecnotyn,dEapry=peaMkIRMin−IRMf1r0Ie0Rq10u0e,nwcaysncelaerarElyp =sk 1ewduede,two itthheabhoiugnhdceodndciesntrtribautitoionnnoeaf rM0IaRn,dwahliochngcataninl o(Ft ifga.ll1b).eTlohwer0e; was any iteration in which no positive traps were sampled would result in an Ep value of
Results of a lognormal regression to determine the effect of trap density and MIR100 on relative absolute error showed that there was a significant synergy between the variables (Table 2)
Summary
West Nile Virus (WNV) causes an infectious disease in birds, horses and humans that is transmitted by the bite of infected mosquitoes[1]. The Illinois Department of Public health monitors WNV by testing groups of up to 50 mosquitoes, dead perching birds (such as crows, blue jays, and robins), and testing sick horses and humans with West Nile virus-like symptoms[2]. The mosquito abundance in traps can be affected by factors such as temperature[5], rainfall[6], structure of urban landscapes[7,8], vegetation[9] and climatic variability[10] Mosquitoes from these traps are collected in pools of up to 50 for viral testing. There is no current method for determining the error introduced into MIR by under-sampling
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