Periodic Reporting for period 2 - H-MIP (Human-Mosquito Interaction Project: Host-vector networks, mobility, and the socio-ecological context of mosquito-borne disease)
Reporting period: 2021-10-01 to 2023-03-31
Mosquito-borne diseases are a growing problem worldwide, placing huge burdens on society and exacerbating poverty and inequality. Dengue, chikungunya, and Zika are on the rise, with each year bringing hundreds of millions of new dengue cases and millions of new chikungunya and Zika cases. Malaria continues to infect hundreds of millions of people annually, killing hundreds of thousands, with recent hopes for a decline now replaced by fears over the diminishing returns of prevention strategies. The massive burden these diseases place on society is felt particularly by those with the least resources, exacerbating social inequality worldwide. To tackle this problem, we need better information about the interactions between mosquitoes and the humans they bite, and about the resulting networks through which diseases flow.
The Human-Mosquito Interaction Project (H-MIP) aims to provide this information, offering a socio-ecological perspective that builds on several key insights: (1) Mosquitoes are an excellent source of information about the people they bite; (2) people are an excellent source of information about the mosquitoes that bite them; (3) mobility phone positioning can provide novel insights about human-mosquito biting networks; and (4) adding a social science perspective to disease ecology is crucial for tackling the problem of mosquito-borne disease. This project aims to reconstruct human-mosquito biting networks alongside human mobility patterns, and investigate how the networks are shaped by human and mosquito population densities, human outdoor activities and water-related behavior, the design and use of outdoor public spaces, socio-economic conditions, land cover, climate, and other factors. The results will be used to make recommendations for improved disease models and targeted policy interventions in Europe and worldwide.
The Human-Mosquito Interaction Project (H-MIP) aims to provide this information, offering a socio-ecological perspective that builds on several key insights: (1) Mosquitoes are an excellent source of information about the people they bite; (2) people are an excellent source of information about the mosquitoes that bite them; (3) mobility phone positioning can provide novel insights about human-mosquito biting networks; and (4) adding a social science perspective to disease ecology is crucial for tackling the problem of mosquito-borne disease. This project aims to reconstruct human-mosquito biting networks alongside human mobility patterns, and investigate how the networks are shaped by human and mosquito population densities, human outdoor activities and water-related behavior, the design and use of outdoor public spaces, socio-economic conditions, land cover, climate, and other factors. The results will be used to make recommendations for improved disease models and targeted policy interventions in Europe and worldwide.
Since starting work in April 2020, the project team has carried out street interviews, analyzed human saliva and mosquito blood meals, made high resolution estimates of tiger mosquitoes across Catalonia, reconstructed human mobility patterns, and used genetic analysis of mosquito populations to show the human role in the spread of invasive disease-vector species at medium scales. We have developed new methods for researching human-mosquito biting networks, and we have leveraged our work to provide important estimates of age-specific human-human contact networks relevant to the Covid-19 pandemic. We have published our results in top scientific journals, presented them at academic conferences, shared them with public health stakeholders, and explained them to the general public in a variety of forums.
Using a novel combination of mobile phone positioning, DNA fingerprinting, citizen science and traditional social science methods, this project is tracing the host-vector networks through which mosquito-borne diseases flow, illuminating the human and mosquito mobility patterns and other behavioral mechanisms that shape these networks, and proposing improvements to dynamic disease models and policy interventions aimed at reducing the risk of these diseases in Europe and around the world. We expect to improve disease models and public health management through a fuller understanding of human-mosquito interactions and the socio-ecological context of a set of diseases that are a taking an increasingly prominent place on the global public health agenda.