Chantal B F Vogels | PubMed Health

PubMed2026

Frequent introductions and climate suitability drive increasing dengue risk in Florida.

In recent years, detection of local dengue cases in Florida have increased in both frequency and geographical extent. From 2022 to 2024, consecutive outbreaks in Miami-Dade County were mainly caused by a single lineage of dengue virus (DENV) serotype 3, prompting questions about changing epidemiology and a transition towards endemicity. In this study, we used mathematical modeling and genomic epidemiology to reveal the spatiotemporal dynamics and drivers of local dengue cases in Florida. We found that annual clusters and outbreaks were caused by frequent short-lived DENV introductions, primarily from the Caribbean, and did not find evidence for local trans-seasonal DENV lineage persistence. Further, we show that the climate-driven increases in local suitability for Aedes aegypti transmission and travel-associated cases were the greatest risk factors for outbreaks in Miami-Dade and the geographic expansion of dengue in Florida. Overall, while we do not yet find evidence for endemicity, we demonstrate how climatic trends are enhancing the local public health risk caused by dengue in Florida.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2026

Evolutionary history of Jamestown Canyon virus reveals complex multi-vector ecology.

Jamestown Canyon virus (JCV) is a historically understudied mosquito-borne virus of increasing concern in North America. We generated 658 whole-genome JCV sequences from northeast United States, including 84% (500/597) of all JCV-positive mosquitoes detected in Connecticut from 1997 to 2022. Then, we applied phylodynamic methods to demonstrate how mosquito phenology structures the maintenance and evolution of JCV. Our phylogenetic analyses estimate that JCV was introduced in the Northeast by at least the early 1700s, and the primary introductions of lineages A and B into Connecticut occurred during the mid-1800s to mid-1900s. Further, we estimate that JCV evolves at a rate of ∼3 × 10-5 substitutions per site per year (s/s/y), making it one of the slowest-evolving known RNA viruses, because the virus spends ∼10 months per year in evolutionary stasis while overwintering in mosquito eggs. To investigate ecological drivers of JCV spread in Connecticut, we paired discrete trait and continuous phylogeographic reconstructions with mosquito surveillance data. We estimate that JCV has a low diffusion rate of ∼30-60 km2/year, which is more similar to slow-moving tick-borne viruses than to other mosquito-borne viruses. We found that univoltine Aedes mosquitoes were likely to maintain the virus across years through overwintering in eggs, accounting for its slow evolution and dispersal, while multivoltine mosquitoes contributed to periodic bursts of spatial diffusion and amplification within seasons. We demonstrate the utility of dense sequencing and phylodynamics to disentangle complex transmission cycles, offering a framework for rapidly advancing our evolutionary and ecological knowledge of understudied viruses.

Animals↗