Epidemiological and ecological determinants of Zika virus transmission in an urban setting
- University of Oxford, United Kingdom
- FIOCRUZ, Brazil
- Université de Montpellier, France
- Centre of PostGraduation in Collective Health, Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana, Brazil
- University of Exeter, United Kingdom
Abstract
The Zika virus has emerged as a global public health concern. Its rapid geographic expansion is attributed to the success of Aedes mosquito vectors, but local epidemiological drivers are still poorly understood. Feira de Santana played a pivotal role in the Chikungunya epidemic in Brazil and was one of the first urban centres to report Zika infections. Using a climate-driven transmission model and notified Zika case data, we show that a low observation rate and high vectorial capacity translated into a significant attack rate during the 2015 outbreak, with a subsequent decline in 2016 and fade-out in 2017 due to herd-immunity. We find a potential Zika-related, low risk for microcephaly per pregnancy, but with significant public health impact given high attack rates. The balance between the loss of herd-immunity and viral re-importation will dictate future transmission potential of in this urban setting.
Article and author information
Author details
Nuno Rodrigues Faria
Christian Julian Villabona-Arenas
Funding
European Research Council (614725-PATHPHYLODYN)
- Oliver G Pybus
Royal Society
- Mario Recker
Wellcome Trust & Royal Society (204311/Z/16/Z)
- Nuno Rodrigues Faria
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
- Ben Lambert
European Research Council (268904 - DIVERSITY)
- José Lourenço
- Andrew Walker
International Development Emerging Pandemic Threats Program-2 (AID-OAA-A-14-00102)
- Moritz UG Kraemer
Labex EpiGenMed (ANR-10-LABX-12-01)
- Christian Julian Villabona-Arenas
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2017, Lourenço et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Epidemiological and ecological determinants of Zika virus transmission in an urban setting
eLife 6:e29820.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.29820
Further reading
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- Epidemiology and Global Health
- Microbiology and Infectious Disease
eLife has published papers on many tropical diseases, including malaria, Ebola, leishmaniases, Dengue and African sleeping sickness.
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- Evolutionary Biology
Several coronaviruses infect humans, with three, including the SARS-CoV2, causing diseases. While coronaviruses are especially prone to induce pandemics, we know little about their evolutionary history, host-to-host transmissions, and biogeography. One of the difficulties lies in dating the origination of the family, a particularly challenging task for RNA viruses in general. Previous cophylogenetic tests of virus-host associations, including in the Coronaviridae family, have suggested a virus-host codiversification history stretching many millions of years. Here, we establish a framework for robustly testing scenarios of ancient origination and codiversification versus recent origination and diversification by host switches. Applied to coronaviruses and their mammalian hosts, our results support a scenario of recent origination of coronaviruses in bats and diversification by host switches, with preferential host switches within mammalian orders. Hotspots of coronavirus diversity, concentrated in East Asia and Europe, are consistent with this scenario of relatively recent origination and localized host switches. Spillovers from bats to other species are rare, but have the highest probability to be towards humans than to any other mammal species, implicating humans as the evolutionary intermediate host. The high host-switching rates within orders, as well as between humans, domesticated mammals, and non-flying wild mammals, indicates the potential for rapid additional spreading of coronaviruses across the world. Our results suggest that the evolutionary history of extant mammalian coronaviruses is recent, and that cases of long-term virus–host codiversification have been largely over-estimated.
