C3-Centro de Ciencias de la Complejidad, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City 04510, Mexico; Centro de Investigaciones en Enfermedades Tropicales - CINTROP, Facultad de Salud, Escuela de Medicina, Departamento de Ciencias Básicas, Universidad Industrial de Santander, Santander, Colombia.
Instituto de Biología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City 04510, Mexico.
Acta Trop. 2024 Mar;251:107117. doi: 10.1016/j.actatropica.2024.107117. Epub 2024 Jan 4.
Drivers for wildlife infection are multiple and complex, particularly for vector-borne diseases. Here, we studied the role of host competence, geographic area provenance, and diversity of vector-host interactions as drivers of wild mammal infection risk to Trypanosoma cruzi, the aetiological agent of Chagas disease. We performed a systematic sampling of wild mammals in 11 states of Mexico, from 2017 to 2018. We tested the positivity of T. cruzi with the Tc24 marker in tissues samples for 61 wild mammal species (524 specimens sampled). 26 mammal species were positive for T. cruzi, of which 11 are new hosts recorded in Mexico 75 specimens were positive and 449 were negative for T. cruzi infection, yielding an overall prevalence of 14.3%. The standardized infection risk of T. cruzi of our examined specimens was similar, no matter the host species or their geographic origins. Additionally, we used published data of mammal positives for T. cruzi to complement records of T. cruzi infection in wild mammals and inferred a trophic network of Triatoma spp. (vectors) and wild mammal species in Mexico, using spatial data-mining modelling. Infection with T. cruzi was not homogeneously distributed in the inferred trophic network. This information allowed us to develop a predictive model for T. cruzi infection risk for wild mammals in Mexico, considering risk as a function of the diversity of vector-host spatial associations in a large-scale geographic context, finding that the addition of competent vectors to a multi-host parasite system amplifies host infection risk. The diversity of vector-host interactions per se constitutes a relevant driver of infection risk because hosts and vectors are not isolated from each other.
野生动物感染的驱动因素是多方面且复杂的,特别是对于媒介传播疾病而言。在这里,我们研究了宿主易感性、地理区域来源以及媒介-宿主相互作用的多样性作为导致野生哺乳动物感染克氏锥虫(恰加斯病的病原体)风险的因素。我们于 2017 年至 2018 年在墨西哥的 11 个州进行了野生哺乳动物的系统抽样。我们使用 Tc24 标记检测组织样本中 T. cruzi 的阳性率,共检测了 61 种野生哺乳动物(524 个样本)。26 种哺乳动物对 T. cruzi 呈阳性,其中 11 种是在墨西哥新记录的宿主,75 个标本呈阳性,449 个标本呈阴性,总感染率为 14.3%。无论宿主物种或其地理来源如何,我们检测的标本的 T. cruzi 标准化感染风险相似。此外,我们使用已发表的感染 T. cruzi 的哺乳动物数据来补充野生哺乳动物感染 T. cruzi 的记录,并使用空间数据挖掘模型推断出墨西哥锥蝽属(媒介)和野生哺乳动物物种的营养网络。T. cruzi 的感染在推断的营养网络中分布不均。这些信息使我们能够开发一个针对墨西哥野生哺乳动物 T. cruzi 感染风险的预测模型,考虑到风险是作为大规模地理背景下媒介-宿主空间关联多样性的函数,发现将有能力的媒介添加到多宿主寄生虫系统中会放大宿主感染风险。媒介-宿主相互作用的多样性本身就是感染风险的一个重要驱动因素,因为宿主和媒介不是相互隔离的。