Mosquito Control Based on Pesticides and Endosymbiotic Bacterium Wolbachia

• Published in: Bulletin of mathematical biology Vol. 83; no. 5; p. 58
• Main Authors: Hu, Linchao, Yang, Cui, Hui, Yuanxian, Yu, Jianshe
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.05.2021; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Bacteria; Cell Biology; Culicidae; Dengue fever; Fever; Insect control; Insecticide resistance; Insecticides; Life Sciences; Mathematical and Computational Biology; Mathematical models; Mathematics; Mathematics and Statistics; Mosquitoes; Original; Original Article; Pesticide resistance; Pesticides; Populations; Spraying; Vector-borne diseases; Wolbachia; Population suppression; Mosquito-borne diseases; Heatwave; Population replacement; Pesticides; Wolbachia
• ISSN: 0092-8240; 1522-9602
• DOI: 10.1007/s11538-021-00881-9

Mosquito-borne diseases, such as dengue fever and Zika, have posed a serious threat to human health around the world. Controlling vector mosquitoes is an effective method to prevent these diseases. Spraying pesticides has been the main approach of reducing mosquito population, but it is not a sustainable solution due to the growing insecticide resistance. One promising complementary method is the release of Wolbachia -infected mosquitoes into wild mosquito populations, which has been proven to be a novel and environment-friendly way for mosquito control. In this paper, we incorporate consideration of releasing infected sterile mosquitoes and spraying pesticides to aim to reduce wild mosquito populations based on the population replacement model. We present the estimations for the number of wild mosquitoes or infection density in a normal environment and then discuss how to offset the effect of the heatwave, which can cause infected mosquitoes to lose Wolbachia infection. Finally, we give the waiting time to suppress wild mosquito population to a given threshold size by numerical simulations.