Human biting mosquitoes and implications for WNV transmission

Abstract Background: West Nile virus (WNV), primarily vectored from Culex genus mosquitoes, is the most important mosquito-borne pathogen in North America, infecting thousands of humans and countless wildlife since its arrival in 1999. In locations with dedicated mosquito control programs, surveillance methods often rely on frequent testing of mosquitoes collected from a network of gravid traps (GTs) and CO2-baited light traps (LTs). Traps targeting oviposition-seeking (e.g. GTs) and host-seeking (e.g. LTs) mosquitoes are vulnerable to trap bias, and captured specimens are often damaged, making morphological identification difficult. Methods: This study leverages an alternative mosquito collection method, the human landing catch (HLC), as a means to compare sampling of potential WNV vectors to traditional trapping methods. Human collectors exposed one limb for 15 minutes at crepuscular periods (5:00-8:30am and 6:00-9:30pm daily, the time when Culex species are most actively host-seeking) at each of 55 sites in suburban Chicago, Illinois, for two summers (2018-2019). Results: HLC collections resulted in 223 human seeking mosquitoes, of which 46 (20.6%) were Culex. Of the 46 collected Culex, 34 (73.9%) were Culex salinarius, a potential WNV vector species not thought to be highly abundant in the upper Midwestern United States. Per trapping effort, GTs and LTs collect greater than 7.5 times the number of individual Culex specimens than HLC efforts. Conclusions: The less-commonly used HLC method provides important insight into the complement of human-biting mosquitoes in a region with consistent WNV epidemics. This study underscores the value of HLC collection methods as a complementary tool for surveillance to aid in WNV vector species characterization. However, given the added risk to the collector, novel mitigation methods or alternatives approaches must be explored to incorporate HLC collections safely and strategically into control programs.