Vector bionomics and vectorial capacity as emergent properties of mosquito behaviors and ecology
Table 1
The five parameters comprising the classical formula for vectorial capacity (VC or denoted V), describing the total number of infectious bites arising from all the mosquitoes feeding on a single human on a single day under the assumptions of the Ross-Macdonald model [4, 6, 11]. The expected number of blood meals on the pathogen’s hosts, summed over a mosquito lifespan, is given by the term S = fQ/g. The probability of surviving the EIP is P = e−gn. Mosquito population density is m = λ/g. Under the assumptions, the formula for VC is V = λS2 P. In the Ross-Macdonald model, the entomological inoculation rate, , is related to VC by a formula:
, where κ is the proportion of bites on humans that infects a mosquito; the approximation holds when κ is small, such that mosquito super-infection is rare. In MBITES, the same quantity can be computed directly by Monte Carlo simulation.