Mosquito Surveillance Revealed Lagged Effects of Mosquito Abundance on Mosquito-Borne Disease Transmission: A Retrospective Study in Zhejiang, China

Mosquito-borne diseases (MBDs) are still threats to public health in Zhejiang. In this study, the associations between the time-lagged mosquito capture data and MBDs incidence over five years were used to examine the potential effects of mosquito abundance on patterns of MBDs epidemiology in Zhejiang during 2008-2012. Light traps were used to collect adult mosquitoes at 11 cities. Correlation tests with and without time lag were performed to investigate the correlations between MBDs incidence rates and mosquito abundance by month. Selected MBDs consisted of Japanese encephalitis (JE), dengue fever (DF) and malaria. A Poisson regression analysis was performed by using a generalized estimating equations (GEE) approach, and the most parsimonious model was selected based on the quasi-likelihood based information criterion (QICu). We identified five mosquito species and the constituent ratio of Culex pipiens pallens, Culex tritaeniorhynchus, Aedes albopictus, Anopheles sinensis and Armigeres subalbatus was 66.73%, 21.47%, 6.72%, 2.83% and 2.25%, respectively. The correlation analysis without and with time lag showed that Culex mosquito abundance at a lag of 0 or 1 month was positively correlated with JE incidence during 2008-2012, Ae. albopictus abundance at a lag of 1 month was positively correlated with DF incidence in 2009, and An. sinensis abundance at a lag of 0-2 months was positively correlated with malaria incidence during 2008-2010. The Poisson regression analysis showed each 0.1 rise of monthly mosquito abundance corresponded to a positive increase of MBD cases for the period of 2008-2012. The rise of mosquito abundance with a lag of 0-2 months increased the risk of human MBDs infection in Zhejiang. Our study provides evidence that mosquito monitoring could be a useful early warning tool for the occurrence and transmission of MBDs.