Present and Future Arboviral Threats
By Scott Weaver, W. Reisen. Antiviral Research, 2009
1,525 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Arthropod-borne viruses (arboviruses) are important causes of human disease nearly worldwide. All arboviruses circulate among wild animals, and many cause disease after spillover transmission to humans and agriculturally important domestic animals that are incidental or dead-end hosts. Viruses such as dengue (DENV) and chikungunya (CHIKV) viruses that have lost the requirement for enzootic amplification now produce extensive epidemics in tropical urban centers. Many arboviruses recently have increased in importance as human and veterinary pathogens using a variety of mechanisms. Beginning in 1999, West Nile virus (WNV) underwent a dramatic geographic expansion into the Americas. High amplification associated with avian virulence coupled with adaptation for replication at higher temperatures in mosquito vectors, it has caused the largest epidemic of arboviral encephalitis ever reported in the Americas. Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV), the most frequent arboviral cause of encephalitis worldwide, has spread throughout most of Asia and as far south as Australia from its putative origin in Indonesia and Malaysia. JEV has caused major epidemics as it invaded new areas, often enabled by rice culture and amplification in domesticated swine. Rift Valley fever virus (RVFV), another arbovirus that infects humans after amplification in domesticated animals, undergoes epizootic transmission during wet years following droughts. Warming of the Indian Ocean, linked to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation in the Pacific, leads to heavy rainfall in east Africa inundating surface pools and vertically-infected mosquito eggs laid during previous seasons. Like WNV, JEV and RVFV could become epizootic and epidemic in the Americas if introduced unintentionally via commerce or intentionally for nefarious purposes. Climate warming also could facilitate the expansion of the distributions of many arboviruses, as documented for bluetongue viruses (BTV), major pathogens of ruminants. BTV, especially BTV-8, invaded Europe after climate warming enabled the major midge vector to expand is distribution northward into southern Europe and extended the transmission season and vectorial capacity of local midge species. Perhaps the greatest health risk of arboviral emergence comes from extensive tropical urbanization and the colonization of this expanding habitat by the highly anthropophilic (attracted to humans) mosquito, Aedes aegypti. These factors led to the emergence of permanent endemic cycles of urban DENV and chikungunya virus (CHIKV), as well as seasonal interhuman transmission of yellow fever and Zika viruses. The recent invasion into the Americas, Europe and Africa of Ae. albopictus, an important CHIKV and secondary DENV vector, could enhance urban transmission of these viruses in tropical as well as temperate regions. The minimal requirements for sustained endemic arbovirus transmission, adequate human viremia and vector competence of Ae. aegypti and/or Ae. albopictus, may be met by two other viruses with the potential to become major human pathogens: Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus, already an important cause of neurological disease in humans and equids throughout the Americas, and Mayaro virus, a close relative of CHIKV that produces a comparably debilitating arthralgic disease in South America. Further research is needed to understand the potential of these and other arboviruses to emerge in the future, invade new geographic areas, and become important public and veterinary health problems.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Infectious Diseases, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/82cbf513f170e2dc328b636e9095bb2818948117
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Citations in the corpus
- Potential for Zika virus transmission through blood transfusion demonstrated during an outbreak in French Polynesia, November 2013 to February 2014. (2014, background): “Background ZIKAV, an arthropod-borne virus (arbovirus) belonging to the family Flaviviridae and genus Flavivirus [5], was first isolated in 1947 from a monkey in the Zika forest, Uganda [6].”
- Coronavirus herd immunity optimizer (CHIO) (2020, background): “Viruses can be transmitted biologically and it can be replicated by the amplifying hosts [60].”
- Zika Virus in Gabon (Central Africa) – 2007: A New Threat from Aedes albopictus? (2014, background): “Of note, ZIKV transmission occurred here in a previously undocumented urban cycle, supporting the potential for urbanization suggested in 2010 by Weaver and Reisen [27].”
- Biology and pathogenesis of chikungunya virus (2010, background): “From a clinical perspective, the two groups of alphaviruses are subdivided into those associated with encephalitis (predominantly New World viruses) and those associated with polyarthritis and a rash (predominantly Old World viruses”
- Case definitions, diagnostic algorithms, and priorities in encephalitis: consensus statement of the international encephalitis consortium. (2013, background): “Most arboviruses of medical importance belong to 3 families: Flaviviridae, Togaviridae, and Bunyaviridae [65, 66].”