The number of countries and people affected by diseases transmitted by urban mosquitoes (Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus) has increased greatly in recent years. One of the essential factors to understand how the transmission of these diseases takes place is knowing what the interaction between humans and mosquitoes is like, since viruses flow from human populations to mosquitoes and from mosquitoes to people. Although much of the effort to combat these diseases has focused on mosquito control, there is still very little data on the relationship between mosquitoes and humans. The Human-Mosquito Interactions project wants to contribute to this lack of information.

Its objective is to reconstruct the network of interactions that exists between the tiger mosquito and people. How many different people does a mosquito bite? An essential question to better understand how epidemiological outbreaks take place, as well as to be able to develop more precise epidemiological models. The more people a mosquito bites, the higher the risk of transmitting a disease. Previous studies have focused on finding out how mosquitoes detect people, smells and other stimuli for which they feel a preference when biting, but in the human-mosquito interaction, the biology and behavior of the mosquito is not the only one. important variable. The behavior of people, urban spaces and the economy of homes also influence this interaction.

The great heterogeneity in individual behavior as well as between different groups translates into a variability in human-mosquito interaction, and therefore in a variability in the risk of disease transmission. This relationship not only depends on the density of mosquitoes and people in an area but on many other factors. How many people live together, the activities they carry out in outdoor spaces, their behavior when storing water, the urban architecture of the neighborhood, the control actions of possible breeding places, there are many socioeconomic variables that alter human interaction. -mosquito. So it is expected that the dynamics of bites will be determined by these socioeconomic factors, as well as the risk of contracting a disease transmitted by the tiger mosquito.

Genetics, citizen science and sociology to understand the human-mosquito networks through which diseases circulate

To study how interactions between humans and mosquitoes vary according to these factors, the pattern of bites will be analyzed in different Spanish locations, with different climatic and socioeconomic conditions. This will be carried out by collecting bite incidents with the Mosquito Alert app and with field work on the ground. The idea is that on the one hand mosquitoes are a good source of information about the people they bite, just as people are a good source of information about the mosquitoes that bite them. Studying the DNA recovered from the blood of mosquitoes captured in the volunteers’ homes will make it possible to find out how many different people the mosquito bit. This information will be complemented with interviews and observations of volunteers, in order to reconstruct the network of existing interactions between humans and mosquitoes.

This information will be combined with data on urban structure, sun coverage, socioeconomic factors and climatic variables to understand how all these factors influence the incidence of bites in the region studied. With the results obtained, we want to contribute to the improvement of current epidemiological models as well as make proposals for political interventions aimed at reducing the incidence of mosquitoes on human populations. To this end, the project addresses the critical need for a greater perspective from the social sciences to better understand the socioeconomic and socioecological context of diseases such as dengue or Zika that pose great burdens to society worldwide and aggravate social inequality.

The project is made up of an interdisciplinary team of researchers with experience in sociodemography, ecology, entomology, molecular biology and epidemiology.