Bryna Wilson, a student from Grove City College worked with Dr. Nicole Gottdenker and Juliana Hoyos on associations between land cover and trypanosome infections in kissing bugs.
Abstract: Changes in land use and forest cover can affect the transmission of vector-borne diseases by interfering with the ecology of disease vectors. The kissing bug Rhodnius pallescens can transmit Trypanosoma cruzi, the protozoan parasite that causes Chagas disease, and Trypanosoma rangeli, a related non-pathogenic species. We tested for T. cruzi and T. rangeli infections in R. pallescens DNA (N=366) of various life stages collected from 14 sites in Panama by real-time PCR using trypanosome species-specific probes. We also used Google Earth Engine to quantify relative land cover from all sampling sites. T. cruzi single infections were detected in 28% of samples, T. rangeli single infections in 6%, and coinfections in 26%. There were significant associations between insect life stages and single T. cruzi infections and T. cruzi-T. rangeli coinfections. Generalized additive models predicted significant negative associations between the percent of pasture habitat and both T. cruzi single infections and T. rangeli single infections. Molecular analysis of blood meal identity in these kissing bugs is underway to understand if infection-land cover differences observed in our study correlate with differences in mammal communities in contact with these vectors.
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