The Outbreak of Insect-borne and Vector-borne Diseases

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Vector-borne diseases account for more than 17% of all infectious diseases, causing more than
700,000 deaths annually. They can be caused by either parasites, bacteria or viruses. Malaria is a
parasitic infection transmitted by Anopheline mosquitoes. It causes an estimated 219 million cases
globally, and results in more than 400,000 deaths every year. Most of the deaths occur in children
under the age of 5 years. Dengue is the most prevalent viral infection transmitted by Aedes
mosquitoes. More than 3.9 billion people in over 129 countries are at risk of contracting dengue, with
an estimated 96 million symptomatic cases and an estimated 40,000 deaths every year. Other viral
diseases transmitted by vectors include chikungunya fever, Zika virus fever, yellow fever, West Nile
fever, Japanese encephalitis (all transmitted by mosquitoes), tick-borne encephalitis (transmitted by
ticks). Many of vector-borne diseases are preventable, through protective measures, and community
mobilisation.
Vectors Vectors are living organisms that can transmit infectious pathogens between humans, or from
animals to humans. Many of these vectors are bloodsucking insects, which ingest disease-producing
microorganisms during a blood meal from an infected host (human or animal) and later transmit it
into a new host, after the pathogen has replicated. Often, once a vector becomes infectious, they are
capable of transmitting the pathogen for the rest of their life during each subsequent bite/blood meal.
Vector-borne diseases Vector-borne diseases are human illnesses caused by parasites, viruses and
bacteria that are transmitted by vectors. Every year there are more than 700,000 deaths from diseases
such as malaria, dengue, schistosomiasis, human African trypanosomiasis, leishmaniasis, Chagas
disease, yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis and onchocerciasis.
The burden of these diseases is highest in tropical and subtropical areas, and they disproportionately
affect the poorest populations. Since 2014, major outbreaks of dengue, malaria, chikungunya, yellow
fever and Zika have afflicted populations, claimed lives, and overwhelmed health systems in many
countries. Other diseases such as Chikungunya, leishmaniasis and lymphatic filariasis cause chronic
suffering, life-long morbidity, disability and occasional stigmatisation.
Distribution of vector-borne diseases is determined by a complex set of demographic, environmental
and social factors. Global travel and trade, unplanned urbanization, and en List of vector-borne
diseases, according to their vector The following table is a non-exhaustive list of vector-borne disease,
ordered according to the vector by which it is transmitted.
WHO response The "Global Vector Control Response (GVCR) 2017–2030" was approved by the
World Health Assembly in 2017. It provides strategic guidance to countries and development partners
for urgent strengthening of vector control as a fundamental approach to preventing disease and
responding to outbreaks. To achieve this a re-alignment of vector control programmes is required,
supported by increased technical capacity, improved infrastructure, strengthened monitoring and
surveillance systems, and greater community mobilization. Ultimately, this will support
implementation of a comprehensive approach to vector control that will enable the achievement of
disease-specific national and global goals and contribute to achievement of the Sustainable
Development Goals and Universal Health Coverage.
WHO Secretariat provides strategic, normative and technical guidance to countries and development
partners for strengthening vector control as a fundamental approach based on GVCR to preventing
disease and responding to outbreaks. Specifically WHO responds to vector-borne diseases by:
providing evidence-based guidance for controlling vectors and protecting people against infection;
providing technical support to countries so that they can effectively manage cases and outbreaks;
supporting countries to improve their reporting systems and capture the true burden of the disease;
providing training (capacity building) on clinical management, diagnosis and vector control with
support from some of its collaborating centres; and supporting the development and evaluation of new
tools, technologies and approaches for vector-borne diseases, including vector control and disease
management technologies. A crucial element in reducing the burden of vector-borne diseases is
behavioural change. WHO works with partners to provide education and improve public awareness,
so that people know how to protect themselves and their communities from mosquitoes, ticks, bugs,
flies and other vectors.
Access to water and sanitation is a very important factor in disease control and elimination. WHO
works together with many different government sectors to improve water storage, sanitation, thereby
helping to control these diseases at the community level.
Vector-borne diseases are infections transmitted by the bite of infected arthropod species, such as
mosquitoes, ticks, triatomine bugs, sandflies, and blackflies. Arthropod vectors are cold-blooded
(ectothermic) and thus especially sensitive to climatic factors. Weather influences survival and
reproduction rates of vectors, in turn influencing habitat suitability, distribution and abundance;
intensity and temporal pattern of vector activity (particularly biting rates) throughout the year; and
rates of development, survival and reproduction of pathogens within vectors. However, climate is
only one of many factors influencing vector distribution, such as habitat destruction, land use,
pesticide application, and host density. Vector-borne diseases are widespread in Europe and are the
best studied diseases associated with climate change, which is reflected in this Review.
An outbreak in 1996-97 in southeastern Romania resembled a subsequent outbreak in Israel in 2000,
which was associated with a heat wave early in the summer with high minimum temperatures. These
observations are in agreement with a climatic model for West Nile virus with mild winters, dry spring
and summers, heat waves early in the season and wet autumns. Dry spells favour reproduction of city-
dwelling mosquitoes (e.g. Culex pipiens) and concentrate vectors with their avian hosts around water
sources, which leads to arbovirus multiplication. Explanatory models have assisted public-health
practitioners in making decision about the spraying of preventative of preventive larvicides.
Insect-borne diseases are viral and bacterial illnesses from insect (bug) bites. The most common
insects that pass on disease are mosquitoes, sand flies, ticks, and fleas. For example, mosquitoes are
known for spreading the Zika virus, Yellow Fever, and Malaria. Ticks are known to spread Lyme
disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Symptoms of insect-borne diseases. Symptoms will vary
depending upon the type of insect that bit you. Common symptoms of insect-borne diseases can
include: Fever, Chills, Headache, Sore muscles, Skin rash, Nausea and Stomach pain. More serious
symptoms can include: Difficulty breathing, The feeling that your throat is closing, Swelling of your
lips, tongue, or face, Chest pain, A racing heartbeat that lasts more than a few minutes, Dizziness and
Vomiting.

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Infectious diseases transmitted by insects and other animal vectors have long been associated with
significant human illness and death. In the 17th through early 20th centuries, human morbidity and
mortality due to vector-borne diseases outstripped that from all other causes combined (Gubler, 1998).
Malaria accounts for the most deaths by far of any human vector-borne disease. The causative agents,
Plasmodium spp., currently infect approximately 300 million people and cause between 1 and 3
million deaths per year, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa (Breman, 2001).
As described by keynote speaker Duane Gubler, of the University of Hawaii, malaria provides a
particularly dramatic example of vector-borne disease reemergence (Gubler, 1998).
 Familiar examples of successful mosquito vector interventions include: the worldwide reduction of
malaria in temperate regions and parts of Asia during the 1950s and 1960s (Curtis, 2000; Rugemalila
et al., 2006); yellow fever during construction of the Panama Canal; yellow fever throughout most of
the Americas during the 1950s and 1960s (Soper, 1967); dengue in Cuba and Singapore (Ooi et al.,
2006); and more recently, dengue in parts of Vietnam (Kay and Nam, 2005).
Following the drastic depopulation of its vector, the anopheline mosquito, in the first half of the 20th
century, malaria began its resurgence in Asia in the late 1960s. In Sri Lanka, where only 17 cases of
malaria were reported in 1963, an epidemic of more than 440,000 cases erupted 5 years later after
preventive vector control strategies were replaced with case-finding and drug treatment. Similarly, by
the mid-1970s, millions of new post-control cases had occurred in India. In Africa, a recent upsurge in
infection, punctuated by several major epidemics, has erupted in endemic areas (Nchinda, 1998).
Explosive epidemics have also marked the resurgence of plague, dengue, and yellow fever, a situation
that Gubler characterized as particularly worrisome. Plague is carried by rodent fleas, which transmit
the pathogen Yersinia pestis when they bite animals or humans (CDC, 2005a).
Dengue’s resurgence has been marked not only by epidemics, but also by the emergence of a more
severe form of disease, dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF) (Gubler, 1998).
The summer of 2007 brought the worst dengue epidemic in nearly a decade to Asia (Mason, 2007).
By July—well before transmission was expected to have peaked—Indonesia alone had experienced
over 100,000 infections and 1,100 deaths. The epidemic was apparently spurred by weather
conditions: a period of drought, during which water stored around homes provided an ideal habitat for
mosquitoes to breed. This was followed by unusually hot, humid weather, in which adult mosquitoes
thrive (ProMed-Mail, 2007; Anyamba et al., 2006).
In 1960, an article described how viruses isolated from specimens collected in Manila (12 from
human sera and 2 from wild-caught mosquitoes) were adapted to suckling mice and shown to be
dengue viruses. This was followed by the publication of 15 studies on virologic and serologic aspects
of dengue in the Philippines.
Vector-borne infectious diseases, such as malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, and plague, cause a
significant fraction of the global infectious disease burden; indeed, nearly half of the world’s
population is infected with at least one type of vector-borne pathogen (CIESIN, 2007; WHO, 2004a).
From the perspective of infectious diseases, vectors are the transmitters of disease-causing organisms;
that is, they carry pathogens from one host to another.1 By common usage, vectors are normally
considered to be invertebrate animals, usually arthropods, but they may also include fomites, which
are defined as “[a]ny inanimate object that may be contaminated with disease-causing
microorganisms and thus serves to transmit disease” (Hardy Diagnostics, 2007).
Over the past 30 years—following decades during which many mosquito-borne human illnesses were
controlled in many areas through the use of habitat modification and pesticides—malaria and dengue
fever have reemerged in Asia and the Americas, West Nile virus (WNV) has spread rapidly
throughout the United States3 following its 1999 introduction in New York City, and chikungunya
fever has resurged in Asia and Africa and emerged in Europe (Gubler, 1998, 2007; Roos, 2007;
Yergolkar et al., 2006).
The world has also recently witnessed the emergence and spread of Lyme and other tick-borne
diseases (Barbour and Fish, 1993), including bluetongue (a devastating viral disease, transmitted to
ruminant livestock by insect vectors, that first appeared in northern Europe in 2006),4 and the citrus
tristeza virus (an aphid-borne disease that has killed tens of millions of citrus trees worldwide, and
which currently threatens California orange crops) (Chung and Brlansky, 2006; Bar-Joseph et al.,
1989).
Unfortunately, “success led to failure”; some of the successful programs, such as the Aedes aegypti
eradication program that effectively controlled epidemic YF and DF throughout the American tropics
for over 40 years, and the global malaria eradication program that effectively controlled malaria in
Asian and American countries, were disbanded in the 1970s because the diseases were no longer
major public health problems (Gubler, 1989, 2004; Gubler and Wilson, 2005; IOM, 1992).
Additionally, residual insecticides were replaced with less effective chemicals used as space sprays to
control adult mosquitoes. The 1970s ushered in a 25-year period characterized by decreasing
resources for infectious diseases, decay of the public health infrastructure to control vector-borne
diseases, and a general perception that vector-borne diseases were no longer important public health
problems. Coincident with this period of complacency, however, was the development of global
trends that have contributed to the reemergence of epidemic infectious diseases in general, and vector-
borne diseases in particular, in the past 25 years. In addition to the emergence of newly recognized
diseases, there was increased incidence and geographic expansion of well-known diseases that were
once effectively controlled (Gubler, 1989, 1998; IOM, 1992, 2003; Mahy and Murphy, 2005).
The earliest indications that epidemic vector-borne diseases might reemerge came in the early 1970s.
Subsequent warnings were ignored by public health officials and policy makers because of competing
priorities for limited resources (Gubler, 1980, 1987, 1989; IOM, 1992).
It was not until the Institute of Medicine (IOM) report on emerging infectious diseases that policy
makers took notice (IOM, 1992), and not until after the 1994 plague epidemic in India that new
resources were allocated to emerging infectious diseases (Fritz et al., 1996; WHO, 1994).
Of the parasitic infections transmitted by arthropods, malaria is by far the most important, although
there has also been a reemergence of leishmaniasis and African trypanosomiasis. The principal
problem area for malaria is Africa, where 95 percent of all global cases occur, most of them in
children under 5 years of age (Gubler and Wilson, 2005).
Two newly recognized vector-borne bacterial diseases, Lyme disease, caused by Borrelia burgdorferi,
and ehrlichiosis, caused by Ehrlichia chaffeensis, Anaplasma phagocytophilum, and Ehrlichia
ewingui, have emerged as important public health problems in the past three decades (Dumler et al.,
2007; Steere et al., 2004).
The increased transmission in the United States is directly related to reforestation of the northeastern
United States, allowing the mouse and deer populations to increase unchecked, which in turn has
allowed the tick population to increase. A final factor has been the trend in recent decades to build
houses in woodlots where humans share the ecology with deer, mice, and ticks; thus most
transmission to humans in the northeastern United States where the majority of cases of Lyme disease
occur, is residential (Steere et al., 2004).
Plague, caused by Yersinia pestis, is the most important reemergent bacterial vector-borne disease.
The current global increase in case reports of plague is primarily due to outbreaks in Africa. However,
it is the potential of plague to cause explosive epidemics of pneumonic disease, transmitted person-to-
person and with high mortality, that makes it important as a reemergent infectious disease and as a
potential bioterrorist threat. This was illustrated in 1994 when an outbreak of plague occurred in
Surat, Gujarat, India (WHO, 1994).
Of the vector-borne diseases, it is the arboviruses that have become the most important causes of
reemergent epidemic disease (Gubler, 1996, 2002a).
PARAGRAPH 5

The studies presented has a connection to the current study based on the following: (1) the
first study is how it is started. (2) the following related study shows how insect-borne and
vector-borne affected our health. (3) the following literature and study like the current study
has the purpose of learning about the outbreak of the disease in different countries.