Drivers of house invasion by sylvatic Chagas disease vectors in the Amazon-Cerrado transition: A multi-year, state-wide assessment of municipality-aggregated surveillance data.
Raíssa N BritoDavid E GorlaLiléia DiotaiutiAnália C F GomesRita C M SouzaFernando Abad-FranchPublished in: PLoS neglected tropical diseases (2017)
We report widespread, frequent house invasion by sylvatic triatomines in the Amazon-Cerrado transition. Our analyses indicate that readily available environmental metrics may help predict the risk of contact between sylvatic triatomines and humans at coarse geographic scales, and hint at specific hypotheses about climate and deforestation effects on those vectors-with some taxon-specific responses and some seemingly general trends. Thus, our focal species appear to be quite sensitive to higher temperatures, and might be less common in more heavily-disturbed than in better-preserved environments. This study illustrates, in sum, how entomological routine-surveillance data can be efficiently used for Chagas disease risk prediction and stratification when house-colonizing vectors are absent.