Abstract
West Nile virus (WNV) has consistently been reported to be associated with human cases of illness in the region near Chicago, Illinois. However, the number of reported cases of human illness varies across years, with intermittent outbreaks. Several dynamic factors, including temperature, rainfall, and infection status of vector mosquito populations, are responsible for much of these observed variations. However, local landscape structure and human demographic characteristics also play a key role. The geographic and temporal scales used to analyze such complex data affect the observed associations. Here, we used spatial and statistical modeling approaches to investigate the factors that drive the outcome of WNV human illness on fine temporal and spatial scales. Our approach included multi-level modeling of long-term weekly data from 2005 to 2016, with weekly measures of mosquito infection, human illness and weather combined with more stable landscape and demographic factors on the geographical scale of 1000m hexagons. We found that hot weather conditions, warm winters, and higher MIR in earlier weeks increased the probability of an area of having a WNV human case. Higher population and the proportion of urban light intensity in an area also increased the probability of observing a WNV human case. A higher proportion of open water sources, percentage of grass land, deciduous forests, and housing built post 1990 decreased the probability of having a WNV case. Additionally, we found that cumulative positive mosquito pools up to 31 weeks can strongly predict the total annual human WNV cases in the Chicago region. This study helped us to improve our understanding of the fine-scale drivers of spatiotemporal variability of human WNV cases.
Highlights
West Nile virus (WNV), a mosquito-borne zoonotic disease, was first identified in the United States in the summer of 1999 in New York City [1]
We found a strong temporal relationship between the mosquito infection rate (MIR) of previous weeks and human WNV cases in the study region (Table 3, Fig 1)
We identified important fine-scale drivers of spatiotemporal variability in the human WNV cases in Chicago region, Illinois, an area of ongoing WNV transmission
Summary
The overall goal of this study is to determine factors affecting the spatiotemporal variability of clinical WNV incidence in people through identification of the fine scale drivers of WNV transmission in an urban area with a repeated history of WNV outbreaks
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