Emerging Urban Vector-Borne Disease: West Nile Virus in New York City (1999-2006)

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Vector-borne diseases in urban environments are a major public health issue in the developing world. The outbreak of West Nile virus (WNV) in New York City (NYC) in 1999 revealed that even affluent societies are not invincible to emerging diseases. Global climate change is predicted to exacerbate this problem. Although there is a great body of knowledge about the biology of vector-borne diseases (including WNV) and transmission dynamics in rural and semi-rural landscapes, the urban ecology of such diseases is poorly understood. Particularly lacking is a comprehensive understanding of how the built environment directly and indirectly affects transmission, spread, and evolution and how urban environments under anthropogenic influence affect disease dynamics. This study will explore three hypotheses:1. Spatial variation in the built environment leads to percolation-like spread rather than wave-like spread of classical epidemic models.2. The pattern of annual outbreaks is explained by the interaction of seasonal temperature fluctuations and random variation in precipitation interacting with a dynamical infection process.3. Evolution toward avirulence to humans is a byproduct of evolution toward avirulence in birds and/or adaptation in mosquitoes.Each hypothesis will be addressed by theoretical models fit to data on WNV outbreaks in NYC between 1999 and 2006. Results will identify links between the ecology of the built environment and the public health of nearly ten million New Yorkers. Theoretical disease ecology will be advanced by focusing on seasonal forcing, transmission in urban environments, and circulation of multi-vector multi-host pathogens. New knowledge of emerging urban vector-borne diseases will be produced by developing an understanding of this disease system as a model. The researchers will work closely with public health officers in the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to develop recommendations and ecologically-based risk maps that will be useful for controlling WNV in NYC. The research also will include training of two undergraduate students, one graduate student, and one postdoctoral researcher.