172

■Bio-mathematics, Statistics and Nano-Technologies: Mosquito Control Strategies

9.3.5.2

Principal component analysis .........................

182

9.3.5.3

Sum of ranking differences ............................

183

9.4

Concluding remarks and further research ...................................

185

9.1

INTRODUCTION

Today, the vector-borne diseases (VBD) present a severe public health issue worldwide.

Spreading of VBD is conditioned by a joint action of different demographic, environmen-

tal and social factors. The vectors for the VBD transmission are various: mosquitos, ticks,

blackflies, fleas, lice, bugs, etc. Still, mosquitos are the most important since they are a pri-

mary vectors for transmitting the wide range of the VBD. Transmission of different VBD

can be mechanical, sexual, maternal, fetal and through blood transfusion (Abushouk et al.

2016). Three mosquito genus are responsible for the VBD transmission via viruses or par-

asites as pathogens (9.1). VBD such as dengue, Zika, chikungunya and yellow fever are

viral infections while malaria is a parasite infection. According to World Health Organi-

zation (WHO 2021) VBD cause more than 700,000 deaths per year, accounting malaria

with more than 400,000 deaths per year and dengue with estimated 40,000 deaths per year.

A great effort is being invested through financial assets to control and eliminate VBD. For

example, funding for malaria control and elimination reached an estimated 3 billion dollars

in year 2019 (WHO 2021).

Majority of the efficient repellents, insecticides and pesticides are the chemical com-

pounds with biological activity (Tsikolia et al. 2018; Jiang et al. 2017). Beside new chem-

ical compounds, still the major interest and influence for VBD control is held by natural

plant products, manly essential oils (Aungtikun and Soonwera 2021; Li et al. 2020) and

acids (Gurunathan et al. 2016; Moreira et al. 2016). In the field of vaccines, new discov-

eries have occurred so in recent years new vaccines have been tested such as vaccines for

malaria (Datoo et al. 2021), Zika (Poland et al. 2019), West Nile (Ulbert 2019), dengue

(Aguiar et al. 2016), etc. New discoveries in the field of novel biologically active com-

pounds are largely potentiated by computational, mathematical and molecular modeling.

Table 9.1: Summary of VBD with their pathogens and mosquito genus.

Vector-borne

dis-

eases

Type

of

pathogen

Mosquito genus

Zika

virus

Aedes

dengue

virus

Aedes

malaria

parasite

Anopheles

chikungunya

virus

Aedes

yellow fever

virus

Aedes

West Nile fever

virus

Culex

lymphatic filariasis

parasite

Aedes, Anopheles, Culex

Japanese encephalitis

virus

Culex

Rift Valley fever

virus

Aedes