Speaker
Description
West Nile Virus (WNV) is a mosquito-borne virus which primarily infects birds. Infections in humans (and horses) are unusual but serious, and can cause encephalitis and death. In Europe, WNV was first detected in Southern Portugal in the 1960s, with limited circulation in the most southern areas of the continent. Since the 1990s, circulation has increased, pushing further north, with human cases reported in the Netherlands, France and Poland and virus presence in mosquito surveillance in the UK. There has also been a corresponding increase in genomic surveillance efforts, which we can now leverage to understand WNV spread across Europe.
Previous work has used genomic data to look at WNV lineage 2 spread across Europe, including that factors related to land use were associated with velocity of spread. In this study, we expand on this by including three additional years of sequencing data, partial genomes and other European WNV lineages in a continuous phylogeographic analysis. We compared sources and sinks of transmission in the genomic model to risk maps generated using ecological niche modelling to integrate a novel data source into phylodynamic models. Finally, using the combination of ecological niche modelling and phylodynamic analysis, we generated a small predictive model to explore where we expect to most at risk in the coming years.
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