Review of recent studies on avian malaria parasites and their vector mosquitoes

Abstract

Avian malaria parasites of wild birds and their vector mosquitoes have been studied intensively in recent years mainly because of the development of molecular techniques to detect and identify genetic lineage of parasites. This review focused on field studies of vector mosquitoes of avian malaria parasites and examined geographic distributions of vector mosquitoes and genetic lineages of avian Plasmodium parasites based on the Vector data table in MalAvi database. Culex pipiens group and 5 genetic lineages, such as SGS1, GRW11, SYAT05, PADOM02 and CXPIP10, showed a global distribution. The vector-parasite relationships summarized from the Vector data table of MalAvi showed that the average number of reported genetic lineages of avian malaria parasite per suspected vector species was 4.3±8.0, whereas the average number of suspected vector species per genetic lineage was 1.5±1.1. Among 42 suspected vector species of avian malaria parasite 43% of them harbored only 1 genetic lineage and 75% (89/119) of genetic lineages were reported from single suspected vector species. The epidemiological significance of avian malaria vector studies was discussed for predicting the potential transmission cycles of vector-borne zoonotic diseases.