Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T07:08:58.103Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Microfilaria density distribution in the human population and its infectivity index for the mosquito population

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2009

Chai Bin Park
Affiliation:
University of Hawaii School of Public Health, 1960 East-West Road, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822, USA and East-West Population Institute, East-West Center, 1777 East-West Road, Honolulu, Hawaii 96848, USA

Summary

A new method of computing the infectivity index of microfilariae (mf) for the mosquito population is proposed using the estimated mf density distribution in the human population. The observed density distribution is considered a compound of the Poisson and the gamma distributions. The former distribution describes the probability of a specimen containing a specified number of mf and the latter describes the density distribution of mf in the host population. The mf infectivity index is the probability that a blood meal will include at least 1 mf, conditional on the population-density distribution of mf as specified by the gamma distribution. Actual data indicate that this population-density-based infectivity index can be considerably different from the conventional index based on the survey-density distribution. The level of the carrier rate of mf in a survey is greatly influenced, apart from the sample variation, by the average volume of blood taken from each person. The rate computed on the estimated population-density distribution of mf is convertible to any base amount of blood.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Anderson, R. M. (1978). The regulation of host population growth by parasitic species. Parasitology 76, 119–57.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Anderson, R. M. (1982). The population dynamics and control of hookworm and roundworm infections. In Population Dynamics of Infectious Diseases (ed. Anderson, R. M.), pp. 67108. London: Chapman and Hall.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, R. M. & May, R. M. (1982). Population dynamics of human helminth infections: control by chemotherapy. Nature, London 297, 557–63.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Anscombe, F. J. (1949). The statistical analysis of insect counts based on the negative binomial distribution. Biometrics 5, 165–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crofton, H. D. (1971). A quantitative approach to parasitism. Parasitology 62, 179–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Croll, N. A., Anderson, R. M., Gyorkos, T. W. & Ghadirian, E. (1982). The population biology and control of Ascaris lumbricoides in a rural community in Iran. Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 76, 187–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Desowitz, R. S., Berman, S. J. & Puloka, T. (1976). Hyperendemic subperiodic Bancroftian filariasis: a search for clinical and immunological correlates of microfilaraemia. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 54, 565–71.Google ScholarPubMed
Desowitz, R. S. & Southgate, B. A. (1973). Studies on filariasis in the Pacific. 2. The persistence of microfilaraemia in diethylcarbamazine-treated populations of Fiji and Western Samoa: diagnostic application of the membrane-filtration technique. Southeast Asian Journal of Tropical Medicine and Public Health 4, 179–83.Google ScholarPubMed
Edeson, J. F. B. (1959). Studies on filariasis in Malaya: the accuracy of blood surveys. Annals of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology 53, 388–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hairston, N. G. & Jachowski, L. A. (1967). Analysis of Wuchereria bancrofti population in the people of American Samoa. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 38, 2959.Google Scholar
Johnson, N. L. & Kotz, S. (1969). Discrete Distributions. New York: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
McMahon, J. E., Marshall, T. F. L. & Vaughan, J. P. (1979). Tanzania Filariasis Project: a provocative delay test with diethylcarbamazine for the detection of microfilariae of nocturnally periodic Wuchereria bancrofti in the blood. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 57, 759–65. (Corrigendum: 58, 805.)Google Scholar
Pichon, G. M., Merlin, G., Fagneaux, F., Rivière, F. & Laigret, J. (1980). Etude de la distribution des numérations microfilariennes dans des foyers de filariose lymphatique. Tropenmedizin und Parasitologie 31, 165–80.Google Scholar
Pielou, E. C. (1977). Mathematical Ecology, 2nd Edn. New York: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Rosen, L. (1955). Observations on the epidemiology of human filariasis in French Oceania. American Journal of Hygiene 6, 219–48.Google Scholar
Sasa, M. (1967). Microfilaria survey methods and analysis of survey data in filariasis control programmes. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 37, 629–50.Google ScholarPubMed
Sasa, M. (1974). Methods for estimating the efficiency of detection of microfilariae in various volumes of blood samples. Southeast Asian Journal of Tropical Medicine and Public Health 5, 197210.Google ScholarPubMed
Sasa, M. (1976). Human Filariasis. Baltimore: University Park Press.Google Scholar
Tanner, C. E., Curtis, M. A., Sole, T. D. & Gyapay, K. (1980). The nonrandom, negative binomial distribution of experimental trichinellosis in rabbits. Journal of Parasitology 66, 802–5.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wong, M. S. & Bundy, D. A. P. (1985). Population distribution of Ochoterenella digiticauda (Nematoda: Onchocercidae) and Mesocoelium monas (Digenea: Brachycoeliidae) in naturally infected Bufo marinus (Amphibia: Bufonidae) from Jamaica. Parasitology 90, 457–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
W.H.O. (1974). World Health Organization Expert Committee on Filariasis. Third Report. Technical Report Series no. 542. Geneva: WHO.Google Scholar