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Blood Meal Sources of Anopheles spp. in Malaria Endemic Areas of Honduras

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A peer-reviewed article of this preprint also exists.

Denis Escobar,Krisnaya Ascencio,

Denis Escobar,Krisnaya Ascencio,

This version is not peer-reviewed

Submitted:

01 July 2020

Posted:

02 July 2020

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Abstract

Malaria remains a life-threatening disease in many tropical countries. Honduras has successfully reduced malaria transmission as different control methods have been applied focusing mainly on indoor mosquitoes. The selective pressure exerted by the use of insecticides inside the households could modify the feeding behavior of the mosquitoes forcing them to search for available animal hosts outside the houses. These animal hosts in the peridomicile could consequently become an important factor in maintaining vector populations in endemic areas. Herein, we investigated the blood meal sources and Plasmodium spp. infection on anophelines collected outdoors in endemic areas of Honduras. Individual PCR reactions with species-specific primers were used to detect five feeding sources on 181 visibly engorged mosquitoes. In addition, a subset of these mosquitoes where chosen for pathogen analysis by a nested PCR approach. Most mosquitoes fed on multiple hosts (2 to 4), and 24.9% of mosquitoes were fed on a single host, animal or human. Chicken and bovine were the most frequent blood meal sources (29.5% and 27.5% respectively). The average human blood index (HBI) was 22.1%. None of the mosquitoes was found to be infected with Plasmodium spp. Our results show the opportunistic and zoophilic behavior of Anopheles mosquitoes in Honduras.

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Subject: Biology and Life Sciences - Insect Science

Copyright: This open access article is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, which permit the free download, distribution, and reuse, provided that the author and preprint are cited in any reuse.