Assessing the Relationship between various Climatic Risk Factors & Mosquito Abundance in Recife, Brazil

Recife is one of many regions in the North Eastern section of Brazil to be hit hard by the Zika virus outbreak in 2015. Zika infection is caused by the arboviruses transmitted by the Aedes mosquitoes which are abundant in Brazil. It is a known fact that increased abundance of the Aedes mosquito is typically associated with standing (or stagnant) water which serves as a reservoir or hotspot for breeding. Apart from the presence of standing (or stagnated) water in human dwellings, it is important to consider other intermediate factors that drive the mosquitoes to increase in population size. We consider the example of a set of climate conditions such as land surface temperature, humidity, precipitation, seasonality etc. These are typical risk factors that must be taken into consideration especially for the spatial and early warning prediction of breeding hotspots for the Aedes mosquito species responsible for transmitting Zika viruses in Brazil. In this work-in-progress study, we bring together historical records from a mosquito surveillance and control programme conducted by the Centre for Environmental Surveillance Agency in Recife and open source climate information. We use a population-based ecological study design to explore the regional-level spatial-temporal relationship between the prevalence of households detected to have increased mosquito larvae density and environmental risk factors such as temperature and precipitation.