Rockies and High Plains Vector-borne Diseases Center Summer Internship

Hello,     We have been working hard on analyzing the results for our tick study from last summer. As mentioned before, we are studying the correlations of tick presence and numbers with different vegetation types in Colorado wild areas. I have been modeling our data with some different parameters to find the greatest fit and to see where these correlations are significant/strongest. Nothing is final, but some interesting patterns and outcomes are worth noting.       We have decided to use a Zero-inflated Generalized Linear Mixed Model with our data, which splits the results into two categories, one for the correlations with the presence of ticks alone, and one for the correlations with the number of ticks. No matter what I have done so far in the modeling, one variable has a very strong correlation with tick numbers: time of year. This was to be expected; we saw a drastic drop in abundance as the summer progressed last year, and it's nice to see that this ...

We have been met with a diabolically confounding problem throughout the course of the past few weeks. Inspection and treatment has been in full swing, and yet; adult mosquitos are appearing in the Animas River Valley in numbers not seen in over a decade. This has been an exceptionally dry summer, not one conducive to the creation of mosquito habitat. So the question remains; where are they coming from?  We have several hypotheses as to this problem, chiefly the migration of mosquitos from unmanaged US Forest Service lands to populated areas where they are reported. If this is indeed the case, the problem we are encountering will be a prolonged and nuanced one. US Forest Service lands are notoriously tricky to gain access to as a commercial organization, and much more so if you plan on dispersing active compounds within the area. Attached is video evidence of the prolific numbers of adults we are seeing; 69,000 in a single trap! As I mentioned above, these numbers have not been ...

 Hi everybody again!  We have been continuing to roll out workplace flow improvements. The lovely Jess and Jessie worked together to make photo documents of each Buffalo Turbine site, so that the traps are placed in the same place every time, which is especially helpful when different people set and pickup traps. This afternoon I made a macro that can reformat our usual data entry method for batch uploading to VectorSurv, where people around the US can see our mosquito counts. Still have to enter our testing data, which I worked on last week and Morgan is doing this week!! Our plate last week went perfectly. The controls and standard curves performed just as they're supposed to. We did get some positive results but I believe those are being double checked before we release anything, so obviously I can't share what places and when. But! Results are coming in, and they're coming in with a short turnaround, which is great. I stayed in lab most of this week, doing auxiliary stu...

Hello again! So far on my end it has primarily been still getting buffalo turbine and regular trapping done. We've also been working in getting out samples to UNM's labs in order to test for West Nile. We've gotten a few positive results back thus far, but not too many.  Most of week 7 for me has been working in the UNM lab and learning how to do actual testing for ST Louis Encephalitis and West Nile, which has been very interesting. We have a machine called the Kingfisher which has been fun to get to figure out how to use. I'm not too sure on the specifics but it's basically a large batch testing machine for RNA testing which runs pretty quickly. Personally, I quite enjoy doing lab work and looking forward to hopefully doing more in the future.  Not many updates thus far, hopefully there will be something more interesting to report in the future. Until then I wish you all the best of luck!

 Like many of the other counties in Colorado, Weld has officially had their first positive WNV mosquitos. We had a huge jump in positive mosquitoes from our first + week to now. Every zone in Weld has mosquitos with WNV. However despite the unusual amount of rain Weld has been getting out overall mosquito numbers are pretty average. I do wonder how the high levels of positive mosquitos but normal # will affect the number of human cases in Weld. The unfortunate part about doing WNV work is that even when we do get human cases there isn't much we can do other than palliative care and prevention education. We've been trying to do senior education about WNV and providing mosquito repellent but it's also hard to always avoid mosquitos, no matter what age you are. But hopefully it will help at least a couple people feel more prepared for WNV season.

West Nile surveillance over here at Jefferson County Public Health is progressing smoothly. Sabrina and I have added another surveillance site in JeffCo, so we're up to 6 sites total. Last week, one of our sites captured 2,200 mosquitoes, which is more than all the Culex mosquitoes collected in JeffCo from 2010 to 2020 combined . This made for a long day of ID-ing, but we're getting very efficient at ID-ing those little guys. This site is also a bird sanctuary, so I'm particularly interested to follow it for the summer given that West Nile is an avian disease. In the past couple weeks, I've also had the opportunity to shadow JeffCo's epidemiology team, as we had our first suspected West Nile case a couple weeks ago. It ended up not being a true West Nile case, but it was interesting to see the human epidemiology side of the surveillance work we're doing. When not in the field, I've been continuing to work through past years' surveillance data, dating bac...

 This week, we were exploring the potential development of Natular resistance in mosquito larvae. This was in response to a suspicious number of treatments giving way to larval activity before their listed expiration date. We have been treating the vast majority of these sites with Natular products, both in briquette and granular form. The newfound resistance to these products is alarming, considering the frequency with which we employ them. To test resistance, we captured hundreds of 2nd-stage larvae. These larvae were then sorted into cups with increasing concentrations of Natular G30. The larvae were "fed" twice daily. In total, the experiment ran for three days. The findings were concerning; ~20-30% of larvae survived all stages of treatment, with an additional ~10% surviving until the last treatment. This displays a clear resistance to Natular products, at least with larvae located in the Animas district.  The actions to be taken following this experiment are at the mome...