New publication on the future global distribution of Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus

Published on March 01, 2019, by Marius Gilbert

Since a few years, we have been involved in the development of method to measure the rate of spread of biolgical invasions. More specifically, we published a new method to quantify the local velocity of the front wave of an invasion, and applied this method to measure the rate of spread of several bluetongue epidemics.

Recently, the sampe method was applied to describe the invasion by Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus in US and in Europe in a large collaborative study lead by Moritz Kraemer, at the university of Oxford. The results of this study have just been published in Nature Microbiology, and predict what could be the future distribution of these two vectors under global change scenarios toward 2080. These two vectors species are particularly important as they can transmit several diseases such as Dengue fever, Yello fever, or the Zika virus. The study shows that significant parts of southern Europe may become suitable for these two vectors toward 2050 according to the climate change scenario RCP 6.0.

Reference:
Kraemer MUG, Reiner RC, Brady OJ, Messina JP, Gilbert M, Pigott DM, Yi D, Johnson K, Earl, L, Marczak LB, Shirude S, Weaver ND, Bisanzio D, Perkins TA, Lai S, Lu X, Jones P, Coelho GE, Carvalho RG, Bortel WV, Marsboom C, Hendrickx G, Schaffner F, Moore CG, Nax HH, Bengtsson L, Wetter E, Tatem AJ, Brownstein JS, Smith DL, Lambrechts L, Cauchemez S, Linard C, Faria NR, Pybus OG, Scott TW, Liu Q, Yu H, Wint GRW, Hay SI, Golding N (2019). Past and future spread of the arbovirus vectors Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. Nature Microbiology 1 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-019-0376-y