The Panamá Canal construction encompassed one of the first examples of malaria elimination. Nevertheless, malaria has uninterruptedly persisted in Native American populations living within a few kilometers of the Panamá Canal. Here, we present results from a monthly longitudinal study (May 2016 to March 2018), whose goal was to quantitatively describe seasonal patterns of Plasmodium spp. infection in Anopheles albimanus Wiedemann, and its association with environmental covariates, at Ipetí-Guna, a village within a region targeted for malaria elimination in Panamá. To detect Plasmodium spp. infections we employed a standard nested PCR on DNA extracts from mosquito pools of varying size, which were then used to estimate monthly infection rates using a maximum likelihood method. The infection rate estimates (IR) were analyzed using time series analysis methods to study their association with changes in rainfall, temperature, NDVI (a satellite derived vegetation index), malaria cases and human biting rates (HBR). We found that mosquitoes were infected by Plasmodium vivax mainly from September to December, reaching a peak in December. Time series modeling showed malaria IR in An albimanus increased, simultaneously with HBR, and IR in the previous month. These results suggest that elimination interventions, such as mass drug administration, are likely to be more effective if deployed from the middle to the end of the dry season (March and April at Ipetí-Guna), when the likelihood of malaria infection in mosquitoes is very low and when curtailing human infections driving infections in mosquitoes can reduce malaria transmission, and increase the chance for elimination.
Keywords: Entomologic inoculation rate; Mosquito ecology; Nested PCR; Plasmodium vivax; Time series models.
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