Table 3 Summary of traditional and novel arbovirus surveillance methods
From: Searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack: advances in mosquito-borne arbovirus surveillance
Method | Advantages | Disadvantages | Application |
|---|---|---|---|
Monitoring human and animal disease | Uses data that is already being collected by hospitals, health practitioners, and animal health personnel | Overlap of clinical symptoms within arboviruses and other pathogens. Not ideal for early warning since active transmission will be already occurring | National disease surveillance databases |
Sentinel animals | Can act as an early warning system | Animals can be amplifying hosts. High costs associated with animal rearing. Cross reactivity between closely related arboviruses when using serological assays | Routine surveillance, inform control strategies |
Virus isolation from pools of mosquitoes | Increases virus titer allowing for genotypic and phenotypic characterization | Time consuming. Requires special infrastructure (biological containment). Requires a cold chain | Routine surveillance, virus identification, inform control strategies |
Virus detection in pools of mosquitoes using molecular assays | Allows high throughput screening. High sensitivity | Will only detect RNA from viruses that the assays were designed to detect. Requires special infrastructure | Routine surveillance, research, inform control strategies |
Virus detection in pools of mosquitoes using rapid antigen detection assays | Rapid. Does not require specialized equipment. Lower cost | Lower sensitivity than molecular methods | Routine surveillance in low resource settings |
Sugar-based surveillance | Does not require a cold chain. Only 1-2 samples per trap are tested potentially compared with 1000s of mosquitoes using other methods of surveillance. Better estimation of transmission risk | Relies on a nanoliter amounts of expectorate. Mosquitoes need to be kept alive for as long as possible to increase feeding on cards. Cannot be used to incriminate mosquito species as vectors. Requires special infrastructure | Routine surveillance, ideal for remote locations |
Next-generation sequencing of mosquito samples | Does not require prior information (will detect any arbovirus present in the sample) | High cost. Requires bioinformatics knowledge. Requires special infrastructure | Research, virus discovery |
Xenosurveillance | Mosquito acts as an environmental sampler. Allows detection of viruses that do not replicate in the mosquito | Blood engorged mosquitoes are difficult to collect | Research and surveillance of arboviruses and other pathogens |