Ecoepidemiology of Chagas Disease in a Biological Corridor in Southeastern Mexico: A Promising Approach to Understand the Risk of Chagas Disease.

Ecoepidemiology is an emerging field that attempts to explain how biotic, environmental, and even social factors influence the dynamics of infectious diseases. Particularly in vector-borne diseases, the study under this approach offers us an overview of the pathogens, vectors, and hosts that coexist in a given region and their ecological determinants. As a result of this, risk predictions can be established in a changing environment and how it may impact human populations. This paper is aimed at evaluating some ecoepidemiological characteristics of Chagas disease in a natural reserve in southeastern Mexico that borders human settlements. We carry out a cross-sectional study in 2022 where we search insects manually and with light traps. We set traps for small mammals and bats and conducted interviews with the inhabitants living around the study site. We identified the presence of Triatoma dimidiata and T. huehuetenanguensis species with a percentage of TcI T. cruzi infection of 68.4% (95% CI: 66.9-69.9). Temperature and humidity were not determining factors for the probability of insect capture. Of the 108 wild mammals (Chiroptera, Rodentia, and Didelphimorphia), none was infected with T. cruzi. Knowledge about Chagas disease in nearby inhabitants is poor, and some characteristics were found on the periphery of dwellings that could offer a refuge for insect vectors. With this information, surveillance strategies can be generated in the study area that reduce the risk of transmission of T. cruzi parasite to humans, and it is expected to motivate the use of this field in future research.

The Sonozotz project: Assembling an echolocation call library for bats in a megadiverse country.

Bat acoustic libraries are important tools that assemble echolocation calls to allow the comparison and discrimination to confirm species identifications. The Sonozotz project represents the first nation-wide library of bat echolocation calls for a megadiverse country. It was assembled following a standardized recording protocol that aimed to cover different recording habitats, recording techniques, and call variation inherent to individuals. The Sonozotz project included 69 species of echolocating bats, a high species richness that represents 50% of bat species found in the country. We include recommendations on how the database can be used and how the sampling methods can be potentially replicated in countries with similar environmental and geographic conditions. To our knowledge, this represents the most exhaustive effort to date to document and compile the diversity of bat echolocation calls for a megadiverse country. This database will be useful to address a range of ecological questions including the effects of anthropogenic activities on bat communities through the analysis of bat sound.