The research team, led by Mikel A. González of the SASTI Group in Madrid together with colleagues from the University of Córdoba, the Center for Rickettsiosis and Arthropod Vector-Borne Diseases in La Rioja, Clemson University, and the University of Zaragoza, focused on three summer mountain meadows in La Rioja, a region of northern Spain where transhumance-style grazing still brings cattle to upland pastures during the warm months. The choice of location was deliberate. Livestock grazing exposes animals to arthropods of veterinary importance, particularly in summer, and many fly species affect cattle both directly, through swarming and biting that cause stress and blood loss, and indirectly, by transmitting parasites and pathogens. Severe infestations can depress weight gain and milk yield and, in extreme cases, kill animals. Yet, as the authors note, knowledge of which pest species actually share these high-elevation habitats with grazing cattle remained remarkably thin.

To capture that hidden diversity, the team deployed a combination of sampling techniques rather than relying on any single method. The workhorse of the survey was the suction light trap baited with dry ice, a CDC-style design in which carbon dioxide released from sublimating dry ice mimics the breath of a large mammal and draws in host-seeking flies, which are then pulled into a collection chamber by a small fan. Traps were complemented by hand-netting flies around cattle, with ranchers supervising the collections directly on the animals, and by dipping aquatic habitats for larvae and pupae of species whose immature stages develop in water. This multi-pronged strategy matters because different fly families respond to different cues: some are strongly attracted to light and carbon dioxide, others are best caught in flight around their hosts, and some, such as bot flies, are rarely captured by conventional adult sampling at all.

The results paint a detailed picture of the summer fly fauna. In total, 6,372 specimens were collected, representing at least 53 species in eight dipteran families of veterinary importance. The single most abundant family was the Muscidae, the house fly relatives, with 2,118 specimens, including 14 individuals of the horn fly Haematobia irritans, a notorious blood-feeding pest of cattle that spends nearly its entire adult life clinging to the hides of its hosts. Close behind came the blackflies, family Simuliidae, with 1,843 specimens belonging to at least 10 species, a reminder that these small, hump-backed insects, famous for their painful bites, thrive in the cool running waters that drain mountain landscapes. Biting midges of the family Ceratopogonidae accounted for 1,072 specimens representing 20 species, making them the most species-rich group in the survey, followed by 708 mosquitoes of nine species, 505 horse flies and deer flies of the family Tabanidae spanning at least seven species, and 105 moth flies of the family Psychodidae in two species.

Two rarer finds rounded out the inventory and underscored the value of intensive sampling. Six specimens of the louse fly Hippobosca equina, a winged ectoparasite that scuttles through the hair of large mammals, and a single specimen of the horse stomach bot fly Gasterophilus intestinalis were recorded. The bot fly capture is particularly noteworthy because adult Oestridae are elusive, short-lived insects that do not feed and are almost never attracted to baited traps, so their appearance in a survey of this kind is a genuine stroke of fieldwork luck. Each of these species carries its own veterinary profile, from the mechanical irritation and disease transmission potential of muscids to the voracious blood-feeding of tabanids, which are capable of transmitting pathogens such as anaplasmosis agents between animals during interrupted blood meals.

Beyond the raw counts, the study examined when and where fly activity peaked, using generalized linear models, a flexible statistical framework that can handle the non-normal count data typical of insect surveys. The models indicated that total Diptera abundance varied significantly among sampling periods, among locations, and among the target fly groups. Most taxa peaked in early or midsummer, a seasonal pattern with direct management implications, because it identifies the windows when cattle are most heavily exposed to biting pressure and when vector-borne disease risk, if present, would be expected to climb. The variation among locations also suggests that local habitat features, such as the proximity of streams suitable for blackfly larvae or damp depressions where biting midges breed, shape the composition of the pest community at each pasture, meaning that control strategies may need to be tailored site by site rather than applied uniformly across a region.

A major technical strength of the study lies in its integration of classical morphology with DNA barcoding. Species were identified using traditional anatomical characters, then cross-checked by sequencing the COI gene, cytochrome c oxidase subunit I, the standard molecular marker for animal species identification. The resulting barcode sequences were compared against reference databases in the Barcode of Life Data System, allowing the team to confirm identifications and flag specimens whose morphology alone might have led to ambiguity. This dual approach is especially valuable in groups like blackflies and biting midges, where closely related species can be nearly indistinguishable under a microscope yet differ in their capacity to transmit pathogens such as the viruses responsible for bluetongue and epizootic hemorrhagic disease, both of which are listed among the study’s focal concerns.

To push the taxonomic resolution even further, the researchers carried out phylogenetic analyses for three of the most challenging families: the Muscidae, the Simuliidae, and the Culicidae. Using maximum likelihood methods, a statistical approach that finds the evolutionary tree best explaining the observed DNA sequence variation, and evaluating branch support with measures such as the Shimodaira–Hasegawa-like approximate likelihood ratio test and ultrafast bootstrap values, they reconstructed the relationships among the collected species. The effort generated 55 novel nucleotide sequences corresponding to 16 species, all deposited in GenBank for future researchers to consult. Genetic divergence analyses, computed with the Kimura 2-parameter model commonly used in DNA barcoding, helped delineate species boundaries within the blackfly genus Simulium, a group notorious for cryptic species complexes that can hide distinct vector capacities behind near-identical anatomy.

The practical significance of the work extends well beyond an inventory. By establishing which fly species are present, how abundant they are, and when their populations crest through the grazing season, the study provides the foundational data needed for monitoring and management programs targeting pest and vector flies in European grazing systems. Surveillance programs for diseases such as bluetongue depend on knowing where potential vector species occur and in what numbers, and this survey delivers exactly that information for a habitat type, mountain meadow pasture, that had previously been a blind spot. The findings also give ranchers a scientific basis for timing protective measures, from repellents and ear tags to pasture rotation, around the periods of peak fly activity rather than relying on guesswork.

There is also a broader ecological story here. Mountain pastures are changing under the combined pressures of shifting land use and a warming climate, and the composition of their insect communities is likely to shift in response. Species once confined to lower, warmer elevations may move upslope, bringing with them new biting pressure and new disease transmission risks for livestock that have never encountered them. Baselines like the one now established for La Rioja are the reference points against which such changes will be measured. As the authors emphasize, this is the first comprehensive dataset on the diversity and seasonal dynamics of veterinary flies associated with cattle in the mountain meadows of northeastern Spain, and it transforms a region of anecdotal observation into one of documented, quantified, and genetically verifiable entomological record, ready to support the next generation of livestock health research across Europe’s grazing highlands.

Subject of Research: Diversity and seasonal dynamics of veterinary Diptera in mountain livestock pastures of northeastern Spain

Article Title: Biodiversity of Diptera of veterinary importance in mountain livestock pastures of northeastern Spain

Article References: González, M. A., Bravo-Barriga, D., Oteo, J. A., Adler, P. H., & Ruiz-Arrondo, I. (2026). Biodiversity of Diptera of veterinary importance in mountain livestock pastures of northeastern Spain. Parasites & Vectors. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13071-026-07704-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13071-026-07704-7

Keywords: Diptera, cattle grazing, mountain meadows, COI barcoding, blackflies, biting midges, mosquitoes, horse flies, ectoparasites, vector-borne disease, La Rioja, livestock health

The planetary health framework, first articulated in a landmark 2015 Lancet Commission led by Sarah Whitmee and colleagues, describes the health of human civilisation and the state of the natural systems that support it as inextricably linked. Applied to rice, the framework demands that agronomists, water engineers, climatologists, ecologists and disease specialists stop treating the paddy as a purely agricultural system and instead evaluate it as a coupled human–environment system. The authors of the new comment, drawn from institutions including the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the World Health Organization, the International Rice Research Institute, Eawag, Deltares, the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health and several European universities, contend that this integrated lens can reveal win–win interventions that sector-by-sector analysis routinely misses.

The first and most visible cost is water. Irrigated rice is among the most water-intensive crops on the planet, traditionally grown under continuous flooding that keeps the root zone saturated throughout the growing season. Much of the water applied is lost to seepage, percolation and evaporation, placing enormous pressure on surface and groundwater resources in regions where rice dominates cropping systems. As competition for water intensifies and climate change makes supplies less reliable, water scarcity is becoming a binding constraint on rice production in major growing regions, threatening the very food security the crop is meant to guarantee.

The second cost is climatic. Continuously flooded paddies create the oxygen-depleted, or anaerobic, soil conditions in which methanogenic microorganisms thrive, making rice cultivation a substantial source of methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide over short time horizons. Reviews of the evidence, including work synthesised by Qian and colleagues in Nature Reviews Earth and Environment, have quantified the scale of these emissions and the agronomic levers that influence them. Water management sits at the heart of the problem: the same flooding that suppresses weeds and stabilises yields is what generates the methane, creating a direct tension between conventional agronomy and climate mitigation.

The third cost is the least appreciated: rice paddies can serve as habitat for the mosquitoes and snails that transmit some of the world’s most important vector-borne diseases. Standing water in irrigated agroecosystems can support Anopheles mosquitoes that transmit malaria, vectors of Japanese encephalitis and other arboviruses, and aquatic snails involved in schistosomiasis transmission. The relationship between rice systems and disease is complex and context-dependent, and a systematic review by Chan and colleagues published in Scientific Reports in 2022 examined how agricultural and environmental changes in rice-growing landscapes influence malaria risk. The historical record shows that this connection was recognised decades ago, with the International Rice Research Institute convening work on vector-borne disease control through rice agroecosystem management as early as 1988, and studies such as Mutero and colleagues in Acta Tropica in 2000 testing how water management in Kenyan irrigation schemes could reduce mosquito breeding.

Crucially, the authors argue, these three problem domains are not independent, and managing them separately can create perverse trade-offs. Alternate wetting and drying, a water-saving technique in which fields are allowed to dry intermittently rather than being kept permanently flooded, has been shown in trials reported by Lampayan and colleagues in Field Crops Research to reduce water use substantially while maintaining yields, and it also suppresses methane emissions because intermittent aeration of the soil inhibits methanogens. But the same drying cycles change the hydrology of the paddies in ways that could alter mosquito breeding habitat and snail populations, and the direction of that effect on disease transmission is not uniform across settings. Similarly, intensification strategies that raise yields may increase water demand or pesticide loads, while climate adaptation measures designed to protect rice from heat and drought may reshape the disease ecology of the landscape. Only an integrated assessment can reveal where interventions produce co-benefits and where they shift burdens from one domain to another.

The stakes of getting this wrong are rising. Expansion of rice cultivation is a central pillar of food policy across sub-Saharan Africa, where the Coalition for African Rice Development has promoted ambitious production targets as a route to import substitution and food sovereignty. Research by Jiang and colleagues has documented how rice expansion in Africa changes land and water use, while other recent work has examined the environmental consequences of intensification. If new rice schemes are designed purely for agronomic output, the comment’s authors warn, they risk locking in water stress, methane emissions and vector-borne disease burdens for decades. Conversely, if planetary health principles are embedded at the design stage, the same expansion could be steered toward practices that conserve water, limit emissions and reduce disease risk from the outset.

The technical toolkit for such integrated management already exists in pieces. Beyond alternate wetting and drying, options include site-specific water regimes tailored to local vector ecology, cultivar and fertiliser choices that influence methane fluxes, drainage and edge management that reduce breeding sites for mosquitoes and snails, and landscape-level planning that weighs rice against alternative crops in water-stressed basins. Studies such as those by Echeverría-Progulakis and colleagues in Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, Cuong and colleagues in Environmental Challenges, and González and colleagues in the Journal of Environmental Management have begun to quantify the environmental footprints and trade-offs of different rice management options, while work on arsenic and other contaminants in paddy systems, reviewed by Abedi and Mojiri in Plants, adds further dimensions of soil and water quality to the picture. Adaptation strategies for climate change impacts on rice physiology and agronomy, set out by Wassmann and colleagues in Advances in Agronomy, complete a portfolio that is rich in components but poor in integration.

What is missing, the authors argue, is the connective tissue: institutional arrangements, assessment methods and funding structures that allow agricultural ministries, water authorities, climate negotiators and health agencies to evaluate rice interventions on a common scoreboard. Planetary health provides precisely that common frame, treating human health outcomes, ecosystem integrity and resource sustainability as jointly optimisable objectives rather than competing claims. The comment calls for rice-growing practices to be identified and promoted on the basis of their performance across all these domains at once, which would require cross-sectoral evidence generation, from hydrological monitoring and greenhouse gas measurement to entomological surveillance and epidemiological studies, embedded within agricultural research and development programmes rather than bolted on afterwards.

The message lands at a moment when the pressures on the global rice system are unusually acute. The Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food Outlook report of November 2025 underscores the centrality of rice to world food markets, while climate volatility, water scarcity and the persistent burden of vector-borne disease in rice-growing regions all press in on the same landscapes. The authors, who note that the views expressed are their own and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated institutions, including the World Health Organization, frame their argument not as a rejection of rice but as a defence of it: the crop’s future depends on managing its full footprint. If the planetary health approach they advocate is adopted, the world’s most important staple could be produced in ways that feed a growing population while easing, rather than deepening, the pressures on water, climate and health. The alternative, they suggest, is a system in which each sector continues to solve its own piece of the puzzle while quietly worsening everyone else’s.

Subject of Research: Integrated management of water, climate and health impacts of rice production using a planetary health framework

Article Title: A planetary health approach is needed to manage the wider impacts of rice production

Article References: Braun, L., Boisson, S., Boelee, E., Chivenge, P., Connor, M., Drakeley, C., Drew, G., Gordon, B., Irish, S. R., Lines, J., Mabhaudhi, T., Müller, M. F., Pinsach Boada, J., Arbat Pujolras, G., Said-Pullicino, D., Tharreau, D., & Cumming, O. (2026). A planetary health approach is needed to manage the wider impacts of rice production. Nature Water. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-026-00722-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44221-026-00722-w

Keywords: rice production, planetary health, water scarcity, methane emissions, vector-borne disease, malaria, alternate wetting and drying, food security, irrigation, climate change mitigation, schistosomiasis, sustainable agriculture

The research, published in BMC Environmental Science, was led by Lauren E. Johnson of Washington University in St. Louis together with colleagues at Tyson Research Center. During the summer of 2023, the team enrolled 58 households across the St. Louis metropolitan region, deliberately selecting sites along a wide gradient of artificial sky brightness ranging from roughly 1,020 to 10,500 microcandelas per square meter. At each site, they deployed BG-Sentinel traps programmed to run from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m., capturing host-seeking females and mate-seeking males. The traps mimic a human host by releasing carbon dioxide from dry ice and artificial human skin odors, while their high-contrast black and white design appeals to the visually oriented tiger mosquito. Each morning, the researchers collected, sexed, and identified the catch, and they also sampled mosquitoes with aspirators in the early evening to estimate baseline abundance at every location.

Temperature proved to be a critical piece of the puzzle. Field loggers and National Weather Service records showed that daytime maximum temperatures during the study swung by as much as 13 degrees Celsius, from 25.5 to 38.3 degrees. That upper range matters because laboratory work on St. Louis tiger mosquitoes has pegged their critical thermal maximum—the temperature beyond which survival is threatened—at around 36.7 degrees. In other words, the mosquitoes in this study were frequently confronting conditions hot enough to make daytime activity genuinely dangerous, since a blood meal itself can raise a female’s body temperature to lethal levels.

To untangle the effects of light pollution and heat, the team turned to generalized additive models fitted with negative binomial distributions, an approach well suited to non-linear relationships and overdispersed count data. They also included percent impervious surface cover, a standard proxy for urbanization drawn from the national land cover database, to ensure that any apparent effect of artificial light was not simply a stand-in for dense development. A spatial autocorrelation test using Moran’s I confirmed that neither daytime nor nighttime abundance was clustered geographically, allowing the analysis to proceed without spatial corrections.

The results were striking. The best-fitting model explained 61.9 percent of the variance in nighttime mosquito abundance, and the two dominant predictors were nearly tied: daytime abundance accounted for 28.22 percent of explained variance, while the interaction between artificial light at night and temperature accounted for 28.17 percent. Impervious surface, by contrast, contributed a mere 2.86 percent, suggesting that urbanization per se is a far weaker driver of nocturnal activity than the light and heat conditions themselves. Every term in the model was statistically significant.

The shape of the light response was decidedly non-linear. Nighttime captures were essentially zero at the darkest sites, but abundance climbed sharply once artificial sky brightness crossed roughly 3,500 microcandelas per square meter, remaining elevated all the way to the brightest locations. This threshold pattern mirrors laboratory experiments showing that below a biologically meaningful intensity, artificial light has little effect on tiger mosquito behavior, but once that intensity is reached, nighttime activity switches on dramatically. The authors note that this kind of threshold effect would likely be missed by studies that treat light pollution as a simple presence-or-absence variable, underscoring the value of sampling along a continuous gradient.

Temperature determined whether that threshold mattered. When the researchers colored their data points by whether the preceding day’s maximum temperature had reached or exceeded the females’ critical thermal maximum, a clear pattern emerged: nearly every sampling event following such a scorching day showed some nighttime activity, and the few exceptions occurred almost exclusively at sites below the 3,500-microcandela threshold. Model predictions told the same story. At 40 degrees Celsius, predicted nighttime abundance rose steeply with light pollution; at 35 degrees the increase was gentler; and at or below 30 degrees, the model predicted essentially no night activity regardless of brightness. Dark sites showed little to no nocturnal capture even on the hottest days, indicating that heat alone was not enough—the mosquitoes needed light to exploit the night.

The most likely interpretation is that artificial light unlocks a temporal refuge from thermal stress. Diurnal species that use light as an exogenous cue for navigation and timing may, under light-polluted skies, gain access to a nighttime niche that would otherwise be inaccessible. By shifting host-seeking into cooler, illuminated hours, female tiger mosquitoes can avoid the lethal costs of blood-feeding during heat extremes while still securing the nutrition needed for egg production. Similar heat-driven nocturnality has been documented in other day-active animals, including the white-lipped peccary, but the mosquito study is among the first to demonstrate the phenomenon in a wild disease-vector population and to identify light pollution as the enabling condition.

The findings carry real public health weight. Aedes albopictus is a competent vector of dengue, chikungunya, and Zika viruses and one of the most abundant urban mosquitoes in the temperate United States. If hot weather and bright nights routinely extend its biting window into the hours when people sit on porches, sleep with open windows, or walk lit streets, the geometry of vector-host contact changes. Notably, the effect runs in the opposite direction for nocturnal, light-avoiding Anopheles mosquitoes, in which even brief light exposure suppresses biting for hours. Species-specific responses like these could reshape disease transmission dynamics in densely populated urban areas where both heat waves and light pollution are intensifying, and they argue for control strategies timed to these expanded activity periods rather than the traditional dawn-and-dusk schedule.

The study also bridges a persistent gap between laboratory and field. Controlled experiments had long shown that artificial light at night activates nighttime biting in Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus and disrupts clock gene expression, but evidence from wild populations remained thin; the closest precedent was a modeling study in a large Chinese city that reported high nocturnal activity without pinpointing a cause. By sampling 58 sites across a broad brightness gradient and pairing the data with precise temperature records, the St. Louis team confirmed that laboratory observations translate to real urban landscapes. Open questions remain, including whether the nocturnal shift represents a permanent expansion of the species’ activity period or a temporary behavioral adjustment, and how chronic light exposure might interact with seasonal processes such as diapause. What is already clear, however, is that as cities grow hotter and brighter, the tiger mosquito’s day is stretching into the night.

Subject of Research: Effects of artificial light at night and heat on the nocturnal activity of the tiger mosquito Aedes albopictus

Article Title: Hot days and light-polluted nights increase nighttime activity of the diurnal tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus)

Article References: Johnson, L. E., Tayon, L. L., Uder, E. R., Dobbs, K. G., Radomski, T., Medley, K. A., & Westby, K. M. (2025). Hot days and light-polluted nights increase nighttime activity of the diurnal tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus). BMC Environmental Science, 2(1), Article 15. https://doi.org/10.1186/s44329-025-00029-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s44329-025-00029-3

Keywords: Aedes albopictus, tiger mosquito, light pollution, artificial light at night, heat waves, vector-borne disease, urban ecology, circadian rhythms, host-seeking, climate change, public health, mosquito control

The significance of the advance lies partly in the mosquito genus involved. Culex species have received far less attention from spectroscopy-based methods than Anopheles mosquitoes, which dominate malaria research, despite the fact that Culex vectors are increasingly important players in the transmission of orthoflaviviruses and filarial parasites. Because these pathogens typically infect multiple host species, including birds, mammals and humans, mapping the feeding patterns of Culex mosquitoes is essential for predicting where and when spillover into human populations is likely to occur. Traditional blood meal identification relies on techniques such as PCR-based assays or sequencing, which are accurate but costly, time-consuming and progressively less reliable as the blood meal is digested inside the mosquito. A method that is rapid, inexpensive and robust to digestion time could transform the scale at which blood meal surveillance is feasible, particularly in the low-resource settings where mosquito-borne disease burdens are often highest.

The experimental design was straightforward but rigorous. The team reared Culex quinquefasciatus mosquitoes in the laboratory and fed them blood from six different host species: human, pig, chicken, cattle, dog and horse. This panel deliberately spans the range of hosts that matter most for multi-host pathogens in many endemic regions, from domestic animals that amplify viruses to humans who suffer the consequences. At four time points after feeding, namely 6, 12, 24 and 30 hours, the researchers rolled the abdominal contents of the mosquitoes onto filter paper to create dried bloodspots, a simple and field-friendly way of preserving samples without refrigeration or elaborate cold chains. Each bloodspot was then scanned using a Bruker ALPHA Fourier-transform infrared spectrometer, an instrument that measures how the sample absorbs mid-infrared light across a spectrum of wavelengths.

The underlying physics is what gives the method its power. Mid-infrared light interacts with the vibrational modes of chemical bonds in proteins, lipids, carbohydrates and nucleic acids, producing a complex absorption spectrum that acts as a molecular fingerprint of the sample. Because the blood of different host species differs subtly in its biochemical composition, those fingerprints carry enough information to distinguish a chicken blood meal from a dog blood meal, or a human meal from a horse meal. The raw spectra, however, are far too intricate for visual interpretation, which is where machine learning enters. The researchers trained a multilayer perceptron, a type of artificial neural network, on the spectra from laboratory mosquitoes with known blood meal origins, allowing the algorithm to learn the spectral patterns that discriminate between host species and then apply that learned knowledge to unknown samples.

The results were striking. On laboratory-reared mosquitoes, the trained model predicted host species with 93.6 percent accuracy, a dramatic improvement over the 16.7 percent expected from random classification among six host species. Even more importantly for real-world application, accuracy declined only modestly with digestion time, falling by just 6 percent at the 30-hour mark. This resilience matters because mosquitoes caught in surveillance traps are rarely fresh; they may have fed a day or more earlier, and conventional molecular methods lose accuracy as digestive enzymes break down the host DNA they rely on. A technique that remains reliable across a full day of digestion therefore captures a much larger and more representative fraction of the blood meals collected in the field, reducing the bias that plagues traditional approaches.

The true test came with field-collected mosquitoes. When the laboratory-trained model was applied to bloodspots from wild-caught Culex mosquitoes, accuracy dropped to 67.9 percent. The authors attribute this gap to differences between laboratory and field conditions rather than any fundamental flaw in the approach. Wild mosquitoes feed directly on living hosts, whereas the laboratory mosquitoes were fed through artificial feeders, and the blood used in the laboratory was treated with anticoagulants that wild blood meals naturally lack. Wild blood meals also reflect the true biochemical diversity of free-ranging animals, whose diet, health and physiology vary far more than those of the standardized blood sources used in the laboratory. In other words, the model was trained on a simplified version of the world and then asked to interpret a messier one, and the performance drop is an expected consequence of that mismatch.

Crucially, the team found a practical way to manage this uncertainty. By applying a probability threshold to the model’s predictions, accepting only classifications in which the algorithm expressed high confidence, accuracy on field samples rose to 78 percent, at the cost of discarding 21 percent of samples that the model could not confidently assign. This trade-off is a familiar one in applied machine learning, and for surveillance purposes it is often the right one. A public health programme that needs to know which hosts are driving transmission can afford to leave a fifth of samples unclassified if the remaining classifications are substantially more trustworthy. The threshold approach effectively lets users dial between coverage and confidence depending on the question at hand, a flexibility that rigid molecular assays do not offer.

The economic and logistical implications are considerable. Once the spectrometer is in place, the marginal cost of scanning a bloodspot is minimal, and the analysis requires no reagents, no cold chain and no highly specialized molecular biology laboratory. Filter paper bloodspots can be collected in remote villages, shipped at ambient temperature and analysed centrally, which makes the method particularly attractive for large-scale surveillance programmes in low-resource settings. The study’s field collections in the Philippines, supported by the Department of Health and local partners, alongside work in Australia’s Northern Peninsula Area, demonstrate that the sampling workflow is feasible in exactly the kinds of environments where Culex-borne pathogens impose their greatest burden. The work was funded by the Wellcome Trust, the European Research Council and several university and institutional grants, reflecting a collaboration spanning the University of Glasgow, the University of Sydney, NSW Health Pathology and the Ifakara Health Institute.

There are, of course, limits to what the current model can do. The laboratory training set covered only six host species, whereas real mosquitoes bite a far wider menagerie, including wild birds, rodents, bats and marsupials, and the model cannot classify hosts it was never taught to recognize. Expanding the library of host species, incorporating spectra from wild-fed mosquitoes into the training data, and refining the preprocessing of spectra to correct for the chemical differences introduced by anticoagulants and artificial feeders are all obvious next steps. The authors note that further development using samples from field-collected mosquitoes could enhance classification accuracy and broaden the range of identifiable hosts, and the open-access publication of the work should accelerate those efforts across the research community.

Even in its present form, however, the study marks a meaningful shift in how blood meal analysis could be conducted. By demonstrating that a benchtop infrared spectrometer and a neural network can recover host identities from a day-old blood meal with near-laboratory accuracy, the researchers have opened a path toward blood meal surveillance at a scale that PCR-based methods could never economically achieve. For diseases that move between animals and humans along cryptic transmission chains, that scale is precisely what has been missing. If subsequent studies confirm and extend these results across more host species and more field settings, the humble dried bloodspot, read by a beam of infrared light, may become one of the standard tools of vector-borne disease intelligence, helping health authorities see not just which mosquitoes are present, but whose blood they are carrying and which transmission pathways need to be interrupted first.

Subject of Research: Mid-infrared spectroscopy and machine learning for identifying host species of Culex mosquito blood meals

Article Title: Rapid host species identification from dried bloodspots of Culex mosquito blood meals using mid-infrared spectroscopy

Article References: Rapid host species identification from dried bloodspots of Culex mosquito blood meals using mid-infrared spectroscopy. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13071-026-07703-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13071-026-07703-8

Keywords: Culex mosquitoes, blood meal analysis, mid-infrared spectroscopy, machine learning, multilayer perceptron, vector-borne disease, orthoflaviviruses, lymphatic filariasis, dried bloodspots, disease surveillance, one health, entomology

The research focused on two broad categories of pathogens that dominate concerns about emerging infections. The first are zoonotic diseases, those that spill over directly from animals into human populations, a group that includes some of the most feared pandemic threats of the modern era, such as coronaviruses, Ebola and mpox. The second are vector-borne diseases, which are transmitted to humans through the bites of infected mosquitoes, ticks and fleas, and which include major public health burdens such as dengue, Lyme disease and malaria. By analysing outbreak records for both groups at a global scale, the researchers hoped to identify whether a common set of environmental conditions underlies the well-documented rise in emerging infectious diseases over recent decades.

What they found was a clear anthropogenic fingerprint on the global geography of disease emergence, but one whose details differ sharply between disease types. For outbreaks overall, risk was generally higher in places where people and their livestock live in close proximity to highly fragmented forested ecosystems. Fragmentation, in this context, describes a familiar pattern of landscape change: a once-contiguous forest carved into many smaller woodlands, separated by farms, roads and human settlements. These patchwork landscapes tend to favour certain animal species that thrive at the edges between wild and human-dominated terrain, and many of those resilient species are more likely to carry pathogens. At the same time, people living in or near these fragmented habitats are more likely to encounter the animals, creating more opportunities for pathogens to make the jump into human populations.

For vector-borne diseases in particular, the evidence of human influence was especially clear. The analysis showed increased risks of outbreaks of diseases such as dengue and Zika in areas with fragmented ecosystems, and also in regions experiencing long-term declines in rainfall attributable to climate change. This connection between shifting precipitation patterns and mosquito-borne disease risk adds to a growing body of concern among public health researchers, because rainfall shapes the availability of the standing water that mosquitoes need to breed, and changing climate conditions can expand the geographic range and seasonal activity of vector species. The finding suggests that as climate change alters rainfall regimes across the tropics and subtropics, the threat from diseases like dengue and Zika may continue to grow in ways that are directly traceable to human activity.

Yet the picture for zoonotic infections proved far more complicated, and this complexity may be the study’s most consequential finding. For diseases that spill over directly from animals to people, including many of the pathogens considered the greatest pandemic threats, the researchers found no environmental factors that consistently helped to predict where outbreaks occur. The effects of deforestation, climate warming and agricultural intensification varied considerably from one disease to another, defying any attempt to draw a single map of global spillover risk. This variability challenges a widespread assumption that a common set of environmental drivers, such as forest loss or warming temperatures, lies behind the rise of emerging infectious diseases as a whole. Instead, the authors argue, meaningful progress will require disease-specific and region-specific data to monitor potential outbreak risks, an approach that is more demanding but far better matched to the messy reality of how pathogens actually move between animals and humans.

Lead author Dr Rory Gibb of the UCL People and Nature Lab emphasised this point in comments accompanying the release. Our findings show that no single environmental recipe can predict where emerging infectious disease outbreaks will occur, he said. Disease transmission from animals to people is common in human-modified habitats worldwide, but the exact human activities that drive outbreaks differ between diseases. He added that this variability makes it critically important to improve people’s access to healthcare and to strengthen disease monitoring systems, so that outbreaks of any disease can be detected early and stopped before they escalate into epidemics or pandemics. In other words, rather than betting on a predictive map of the next spillover, the safest strategy is to build systems capable of catching outbreaks wherever they arise.

One of the study’s most striking and potentially policy-changing results concerns not where outbreaks happen, but where they are noticed. The researchers found that the odds of an emerging disease outbreak being reported fell by an average of 32 percent for every additional hour of travel to the nearest healthcare facility. This finding demonstrates the critical role that healthcare access plays in determining where outbreaks are detected, and it carries an uncomfortable implication for how the world has understood disease emergence. Many of the apparent hotspots highlighted in previous global analyses may reflect less about where infections actually occur and more about where disease surveillance and healthcare systems are currently strongest. Regions with poor healthcare access, often the very places where ecological change is rapid, may be silently absorbing outbreaks that never enter the global record, leaving the international community with a distorted picture of the true geography of risk.

Co-author Professor Sadie Ryan of the University of Florida framed the broader lesson as a call for integration. Spillover disease outbreaks are multi-causal, shaped by the socioecological system, she said, adding that this really highlights the need for One Health integrated approaches to surveillance and intervention, because there is no single intervention strategy. The One Health framework, which recognises that the health of humans, animals and ecosystems are inseparably linked, has gained momentum in global health circles in recent years, and this study provides some of the strongest quantitative support yet for that perspective. If the drivers of emergence differ from disease to disease, then prevention cannot rely on any single lever, whether forest conservation, vaccination, or mosquito control alone, but must instead combine interventions tailored to local ecological and social conditions.

The authors of the Nature paper accordingly call for a more proactive and holistic approach to preventing epidemics and pandemics, one that combines the strengthening of health systems, global coordination of disease surveillance, and ecosystem-based interventions targeted at the most important diseases. Such an agenda would represent a significant shift from the reactive posture that has characterised much of the world’s response to emerging infections, in which resources flood toward a pathogen only after it has already caused a crisis. The study team was led by scientists at UCL, the University of Florida and Yale University, and the research was supported by a US National Science Foundation Biology Integration Institute grant to the Verena Institute, reflecting the interdisciplinary effort required to link ecology, climatology and epidemiology at a global scale.

As human populations continue to expand into fragmented habitats and climate change redraws the maps of rainfall and temperature, the pressures documented in this study are set to intensify. The research does not offer the comfort of a simple predictive rule, but it offers something arguably more valuable: a realistic account of how human activity shapes disease emergence, an honest accounting of the blind spots created by unequal healthcare access, and a clear argument that early detection and strong health systems are the most reliable defence available. In an era when the next outbreak may come from any of dozens of pathways, that message, that vigilance must be broad, locally informed and globally coordinated, may prove to be the study’s most enduring contribution to global public health.

Subject of Research: Environmental drivers of emerging zoonotic and vector-borne infectious disease outbreaks

Article Title: How human impacts increase risk of emerging infectious disease outbreaks

Article References: How human impacts increase risk of emerging infectious disease outbreaks. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: emerging infectious diseases, zoonotic spillover, vector-borne disease, deforestation, ecosystem fragmentation, climate change, dengue, disease surveillance, One Health, healthcare access, Nature, global health

The model, which the authors call an interface-resilience framework, rests on three pillars. The first is spillover pressure, the sum of forces that push pathogens across the species boundary and into human populations. The second is microbial community stability, the resilience of the vast microbial ecosystems that inhabit humans, animals, plants, soil and water. The third is governance connectivity, the capacity of institutions, sectors and nations to share data, coordinate surveillance and act in concert. What makes the model distinctive is its explicit claim about how these three dimensions interact: systemic health risk is expected to be greatest when spillover pressure is high, microbial resilience is low and governance systems are poorly connected. Risk, in other words, is not a property of any single factor but of their configuration.

This framing represents a subtle but important departure from how outbreak preparedness is usually conceived. Conventional approaches tend to focus on detecting pathogens once they have already crossed into humans, then containing them through case isolation, contact tracing and, where available, vaccination. The interface-resilience model shifts the analytical focus upstream, to the conditions that determine whether a pathogen encounter becomes a spillover event, whether a spillover becomes an outbreak, and whether an outbreak becomes a pandemic. By quantifying pressure, resilience and connectivity as distinct but coupled variables, the framework gives public health authorities a set of indicators that can be tracked continuously, long before a pathogen has a name.

The review grounds this argument in a sweeping historical arc. One Health, as a formal term, is relatively recent, but the insight that human, animal and environmental health are entangled is old. The authors revisit the lessons of plague and rabies control, two of the oldest sustained efforts in disease management, both of which required intervening in animal reservoirs and environmental conditions rather than simply treating human patients. Plague control demanded an understanding of rodent populations and flea vectors; rabies control depended on managing dog populations and, eventually, wildlife reservoirs. These campaigns, the review argues, were One Health in practice long before the term existed, and they demonstrate that integrated approaches can succeed when the ecological dimensions of disease are taken seriously.

From that historical foundation, the review moves through the modern catalogue of threats that have made One Health urgent. SARS and COVID-19 demonstrated how rapidly a zoonotic virus can exploit global travel networks. H5N1 avian influenza continues to circulate across wild bird and poultry populations, repeatedly raising the specter of adaptation to efficient human transmission. Mosquito-borne diseases are expanding their geographic range as climate change alters vector habitats. Antimicrobial resistance, which the review treats as a quintessential One Health problem, accumulates at the interface of human medicine, veterinary practice and agricultural environments, where antibiotic use in one sector selects for resistance that ultimately threatens all of them. Food- and pet-associated zoonoses add further pathways by which pathogens move between species in everyday life.

One of the more technically interesting contributions of the review is its treatment of microbial communities as a variable in their own right. The human microbiome, the gut flora of livestock, the soil and water microbial ecosystems of agricultural landscapes: these communities are not passive backdrops to disease but active modulators of it. A stable, diverse microbial community can suppress pathogen overgrowth, compete for resources and buffer hosts against invasion. Conversely, disruption of these communities, whether through antibiotic overuse, land degradation, chemical contamination or dietary homogenization, can lower the barrier to pathogen establishment. By placing microbial community stability alongside spillover pressure in the model, the authors make the case that microbiome degradation is a form of systemic risk accumulation, one that unfolds gradually and largely invisibly until it compounds a pathogen threat.

The third pillar, governance connectivity, addresses a failure mode that became painfully visible during the COVID-19 pandemic: the fragmentation of information and authority across sectors and borders. Human health ministries, veterinary services, environmental agencies and agricultural departments often operate in silos, with separate data systems, separate mandates and separate budgets. When a pathogen moves across the human-animal-environment interface, it moves faster than the institutional response can reorganize. Governance connectivity, in the model’s terms, measures the ability of these sectors to share surveillance data, coordinate risk assessment and execute joint action. The review suggests that poor connectivity is not merely an inefficiency but a multiplier of risk, because it delays detection and response precisely when speed matters most.

The review does not remain at the level of theory. It examines practical experience from China, a country whose scale and density of human-animal-environment interactions make it a critical testing ground for integrated approaches. The authors document experience in integrated disease management, in the control of antimicrobial resistance, in sustainable vector control that reduces reliance on chemical insecticides, in food-safety governance and in ecological management. These case studies serve a dual purpose: they demonstrate that cross-sector coordination is operationally feasible, and they illustrate the kinds of institutional arrangements, data flows and regulatory instruments that the governance-connectivity pillar of the model requires. The Chinese experience, the review suggests, offers transferable lessons for other regions confronting similar interface pressures.

The practical payoff of the interface-resilience model, if adopted, would be a shift toward preventive, data-driven health governance. Instead of waiting for outbreaks to trigger emergency responses, health systems would continuously monitor the three dimensions of the model: tracking land-use change, wildlife-livestock contact rates, climate-driven vector expansion and trade flows as indicators of spillover pressure; monitoring microbial community composition and diversity across humans, animals and environments as indicators of resilience; and auditing the interoperability of surveillance systems as an indicator of governance connectivity. Where indicators trend toward the high-risk configuration, interventions could be deployed preemptively, whether that means regulating wildlife trade, restoring degraded habitats, stewarding antibiotic use or building cross-sector data platforms.

The review arrives at a moment when the costs of fragmented thinking are difficult to ignore. Pandemics, antimicrobial resistance, vector-borne disease expansion and microbiome disruption are usually studied by separate communities of researchers, funded by separate programs and managed by separate institutions. The interface-resilience model offers a common analytical language for all of them, one that makes explicit how biological pressure, ecological resilience and institutional capacity combine to determine systemic risk. The authors, affiliated with Wenzhou Medical University’s Institute of One Health, position the framework as a step toward an integrated global health architecture spanning humans, animals and the environment. Whether the model’s indicators can be operationalized at scale remains a question for future work, but the conceptual contribution is clear: the health of humanity is not a standalone variable, and the systems that protect it must be designed with the same interconnectedness that characterizes the threats themselves.

Subject of Research: One Health framework integrating pathogen spillover, microbiome stability and governance for global health risk assessment

Article Title: One Health model links spillover, microbiomes and governance to global risk

Article References: One Health model links spillover, microbiomes and governance to global risk. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: One Health, spillover, microbiome, zoonoses, governance, surveillance, antimicrobial resistance, H5N1, COVID-19, vector-borne disease, public health, global health

Leishmania parasites are transmitted to humans and other mammals through the bites of phlebotomine sand flies, tiny insects belonging to the order Diptera and the family Psychodidae. Among the various Leishmania species, L. infantum is particularly consequential: it is the causative agent of both visceral leishmaniasis, the potentially fatal form of the disease that attacks internal organs, and cutaneous leishmaniasis, which produces disfiguring skin lesions. In the eastern Mediterranean basin, several sand fly species are known or suspected to transmit L. infantum, including Phlebotomus perfiliewi, Phlebotomus tobbi, and Phlebotomus neglectus. Yet the identity and relative importance of vector species vary considerably from one geographic area to another, and in many places the picture remains incomplete.

Israel presents a particularly complex epidemiological landscape. Multiple Leishmania species are endemic in the country, and L. infantum causes both visceral and cutaneous disease in humans, with dogs serving as the main reservoir of the parasite. Despite decades of surveillance, the precise sand fly vectors responsible for transmitting L. infantum in different regions of Israel have remained uncertain. Phlebotomus syriacus, a member of the subgenus Larroussius, has been a common species in the country and a long-standing suspect, but without molecular confirmation its actual role in the transmission cycle could only be speculated upon. Closing that gap was the central aim of the new study.

The research team, led by Liora Studentsky of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Public Health Laboratories Jerusalem of the Israeli Ministry of Health, together with colleagues including corresponding author Oscar David Kirstein, conducted an intensive three-year field campaign between 2021 and 2023. Sand flies were collected using CDC miniature light traps at two villages where leishmaniasis is endemic: Aderet in central Israel and Kahal in the north. The choice of two ecologically distinct sites allowed the researchers to compare vector communities and infection patterns across different parts of the country, providing a more nuanced picture of the transmission system than a single-site study could offer.

The scale of the collection effort was substantial. In total, 20,634 sand flies were captured, of which 13,676, or 66.3 percent, were females, the sex responsible for blood feeding and therefore for parasite transmission. From this pool, the researchers analyzed 4,635 samples representing 5,050 individual female sand flies. Male specimens were identified by morphological examination, while females, which are harder to distinguish by morphology alone, were identified using molecular methods. In all, fourteen sand fly species were identified across the two sites, with species of the subgenus Larroussius dominating the catches at both locations.

The species composition differed markedly between the two villages, underscoring the heterogeneity of the transmission system. In Aderet, in central Israel, Phlebotomus syriacus was the prevalent species, accounting for 27.5 percent of the catch. In Kahal, in northern Israel, the community was structured differently: Phlebotomus galilaeus predominated at 54.1 percent, followed by Phlebotomus tobbi at 24.9 percent. This geographic variation in vector communities is epidemiologically significant because it means that different sand fly species may be responsible for maintaining transmission in different parts of the country, complicating any one-size-fits-all approach to vector control.

To detect the parasite, the researchers screened both unfed and blood-fed female sand flies using a technique known as real-time PCR with high-resolution melting analysis, or PCR-HRM, targeting the internal transcribed spacer 1 (ITS1) region of the parasite’s genome. This approach not only detects Leishmania DNA but also allows differentiation between Leishmania species based on the melting profiles of the amplified DNA. Three samples tested positive for L. infantum DNA: two individual unfed female Phlebotomus syriacus specimens collected in Aderet, and one pooled sample from Kahal. The detection in unfed females is particularly meaningful, since it reduces the likelihood that the DNA merely represented a recent, undigested blood meal from an infected host rather than a genuine infection of the fly itself.

These detections represent the first species-resolved identification of L. infantum DNA in Phlebotomus syriacus both in Israel and worldwide. While the finding stops short of proving that the species is a fully competent vector, since demonstrating vectorial capacity requires additional evidence such as the presence of infective parasite stages in the fly and experimental or epidemiological confirmation of transmission, it provides the first molecular evidence supporting Phlebotomus syriacus as a putative vector of L. infantum in central Israel. For a species that has been on the suspect list for years, this is a crucial step toward formal recognition of its role in the transmission cycle.

Blood-meal analysis added another important layer to the epidemiological picture. By sequencing the blood meals of engorged female sand flies, the researchers identified vertebrate hosts in 74.2 percent of the fed females examined. The results showed a strong dominance of cattle, which accounted for 84.8 percent of identified blood meals, followed by canids at 5.8 percent, with other mammals making up the remainder. The canid finding is especially relevant because dogs and other canids are the main reservoir hosts of L. infantum. Notably, Phlebotomus syriacus females were found to feed on canids in 16.7 percent of cases, a proportion that supports the species’ potential epidemiological relevance as a bridge between the animal reservoir and humans.

The combined findings paint a picture of a heterogeneous transmission system in which multiple sand fly species, different blood-feeding preferences, and geographically varying vector communities all interact to sustain L. infantum circulation. The authors conclude that these results have important implications for targeted surveillance and vector-focused control strategies. Rather than assuming a single vector species across the country, public health authorities may need to tailor monitoring and intervention efforts to the specific vector communities and reservoir dynamics of each region. The identification of cattle as the dominant blood-meal source also raises questions about the role of livestock in the ecology of the transmission system, whether as dead-end hosts that divert flies from reservoir animals or as contributors to sustaining large sand fly populations.

The study was supported by the public health laboratories of the Israeli Ministry of Health in Jerusalem, with fieldwork assistance from inspectors of the Israeli Ministry of Environmental Protection. The research was co-funded by the European Commission under grant 101057690 and by UKRI grants 10038150 and 10039289, as part of the CLIMOS project, one of six Horizon Europe initiatives forming the Climate Change and Health Cluster alongside BlueAdapt, CATALYSE, HIGH Horizons, IDAlert, and TRIGGER. This funding context reflects a growing recognition in Europe and beyond that climate change is altering the distribution and dynamics of vector-borne diseases, making detailed knowledge of local transmission systems increasingly urgent.

For Israel, the confirmation of L. infantum DNA in Phlebotomus syriacus fills a long-standing gap in the map of leishmaniasis transmission. For the broader eastern Mediterranean region, where Phlebotomus syriacus is also present, the finding suggests that this species may deserve closer attention in surveillance programs elsewhere as well. As the authors emphasize, understanding which sand fly species carry which Leishmania parasites, and under what ecological conditions, is fundamental to designing effective interventions, whether through insecticide spraying, reservoir dog management, or environmental modification. The first molecular evidence implicating Phlebotomus syriacus in L. infantum transmission marks a meaningful advance toward that goal, and it signals that the full complexity of leishmaniasis transmission in the region is only now beginning to come into focus.

Subject of Research: First molecular detection of Leishmania infantum DNA in the sand fly Phlebotomus syriacus and its implications for leishmaniasis transmission in Israel

Article Title: First detection of Leishmania infantum DNA in Phlebotomus (Larroussius) syriacus and its epidemiological implications in Israel

Article References: Studentsky, L., Kirstein, O. D., Diaz, D., Elbaz, S. L., Ben Avi, I., Shalan, R., Okla, H., Shilo, S., Kalmus, S., Davidovich-Cohen, M., Orshan, L., & Baneth, G. (2026). First detection of Leishmania infantum DNA in Phlebotomus (Larroussius) syriacus and its epidemiological implications in Israel. Parasites & Vectors. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13071-026-07623-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13071-026-07623-7

Keywords: Leishmania infantum, Phlebotomus syriacus, sand flies, leishmaniasis, vector-borne disease, PCR-HRM, blood meal analysis, Israel, visceral leishmaniasis, cutaneous leishmaniasis, Parasites & Vectors, vector surveillance

The research, published in the open-access journal Parasites & Vectors, was conducted by Daniel R. Matute of the Department of Biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Its central question is deceptively simple: do these mosquitoes behave the same way everywhere they live, or do populations that have colonized different thermal environments also differ in the temperatures they seek out? The distinction matters because temperature preference is not a trivial trait. It shapes microhabitat selection, which in turn influences how often a vector encounters the hosts it feeds on, including humans. A mosquito that chooses where to rest, seek blood, and deposit eggs on the basis of temperature is a mosquito whose biting risk is spatially structured by thermal behavior.

Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus are among the most intensively studied vectors on the planet, yet the study argues that one dimension of their ecology remains strikingly understudied: their altitudinal range, and the extent to which thermal behavior differs between lowland and highland populations. Both species are continuing to expand their geographic ranges year after year, driven by trade, urbanization, and a changing climate. Aedes aegypti is the primary vector of yellow fever, dengue, Zika, and chikungunya viruses, while Aedes albopictus, the Asian tiger mosquito, is a capable secondary vector of several of the same pathogens. Where these insects can live, and where they choose to live within the landscapes they occupy, directly determines which human communities sit in the path of transmission.

The fieldwork took place on Bioko and São Tomé, two islands that form a natural laboratory for questions of range and adaptation. Bioko, belonging to Equatorial Guinea, sits off the coast of Cameroon near the mouth of the Gulf of Guinea, while São Tomé lies farther southwest as part of the nation of São Tomé and Príncipe. Both are volcanic in origin, rising steeply from the ocean floor and offering compressed environmental gradients in which lowland rainforest transitions to montane habitat over a horizontal distance of only tens of kilometers. On such islands, a researcher can sample a 2000-meter elevation span that on a continental landmass might require journeys of hundreds of kilometers, all while holding insular context, isolation, and broad biogeographic history roughly constant.

The first stage of the study was distributional. Matute collected both Aedes species across the altitudinal cline on Bioko and mapped how the abundance of immature stages, the larvae and pupae found in aquatic containers, changed with elevation. The statistical picture that emerged was consistent: abundance follows a negative exponential decay with altitude. In practical terms, this means that most immature mosquitoes are concentrated near sea level, and populations thin rapidly as elevation increases, with a long tail of sparse occurrences reaching up the mountainsides. This functional form is more punishing than a linear decline; it implies that each additional increment of elevation removes a proportionally large share of the remaining mosquito population, rather than a fixed amount.

Comparison with neighboring São Tomé added an instructive wrinkle. The overall distribution patterns of the two species were similar across the two islands, suggesting that the same altitudinal filtering operates in both places. But the models indicated a higher abundance at sea level on São Tomé than on Bioko. Islands that look superficially similar, sharing volcanic origin, tropical latitude, and the same two invasive mosquito species, apparently differ in how many mosquitoes their coastal zones support. Whether that difference stems from ecology, history of colonization, availability of breeding containers, or other local factors is a question the distribution data raise but do not settle. What the comparison establishes is that the pattern is repeatable in shape while remaining variable in magnitude, a combination that invites hypothesis-driven follow-up work.

The second stage of the study moved from the field to the laboratory, and this is where the results become most provocative. Using live specimens collected during the survey, Matute tested temperature preference in a laboratory thermocline, an apparatus that presents an insect with a continuous gradient of temperatures and records where it settles. With such a device, preference can be measured under controlled conditions, free from the confounds of field sampling, where differences in abundance might reflect survival or reproduction rather than choice. The critical comparison was between mosquitoes whose ancestors came from different elevations, tested side by side under identical conditions.

Two results stand out. First, there were no significant differences in temperature preference between the two species. Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, despite their distinct evolutionary origins and invasion histories, did not differ detectably in the temperatures they chose. Second, and more strikingly, the study detected an altitudinal cline in temperature preference: high-elevation populations preferred cooler temperatures on both islands. In other words, the trait varies with elevation rather than with species identity. This is the signature of phenotypic variation organized along an environmental gradient, the kind of pattern that classic ecological genetics has long used to identify locally adapted traits. Because the preference difference appears on two separate islands, it is unlikely to be a one-off idiosyncrasy of a single population; it looks like a systematic relationship between where mosquitoes live and what temperatures they favor.

The conclusion the author draws from this is carefully framed: the results indicate the presence of phenotypic variation in a key trait, temperature choice, that may alter the likelihood of contact between these vectors and humans. The word “may” carries real weight here. The study measures preference under controlled conditions and abundance along elevation; it does not demonstrate that highland mosquitoes bite people less often, nor that the preference difference is genetically based rather than plastic. Mosquito behavior can be shaped by developmental temperature, and laboratory-reared or field-collected adults may carry the imprint of the conditions in which they matured. Distinguishing heritable adaptation from environmental carryover would require common-garden or breeding experiments that the present study does not include. These are not weaknesses so much as the natural boundaries of a first, foundational survey, and the author’s framing respects them.

Even within those boundaries, the public health implications are worth spelling out. If temperature preference varies clinally with altitude, then models that assume a single, uniform thermal behavior for Aedes aegypti or Aedes albopictus may misestimate where human exposure actually occurs. Elevational gradients are also where climate change is expected to reshuffle vector distributions most visibly: as temperatures rise, thermal conditions once found only at low elevations move upslope, and the upper limits of vector ranges shift with them. A population of mosquitoes already preferring cooler temperatures at altitude could be positioned differently in that reshuffling than models predict. Conversely, the steep exponential decay of abundance suggests that highland communities currently enjoy a substantial buffer, with far fewer immature mosquitoes than coastal settlements on the same island. Whether that buffer will hold, and whether temperature preference itself will evolve or shift as the climate warms, are now empirically tractable questions. What this study provides is the baseline: two disease vectors, two islands, one clear altitudinal pattern of abundance, and a measured behavioral cline in the temperatures these insects choose. For a trait as consequential as thermal preference, establishing that the variation exists is the essential first step toward understanding what it will mean for the human communities living along these mountainsides.

Subject of Research: Altitudinal variation in temperature preference of Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes on the Gulf of Guinea islands of Bioko and São Tomé

Article Title: Two species of Aedes show altitudinal variation in temperature preference in the islands of the Gulf of Guinea

Article References: Matute, D. R. (2026). Two species of Aedes show altitudinal variation in temperature preference in the islands of the Gulf of Guinea. Parasites & Vectors. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13071-026-07662-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13071-026-07662-0

Keywords: Aedes aegypti, Aedes albopictus, temperature preference, altitudinal cline, Bioko, São Tomé, Gulf of Guinea, disease vectors, mosquito ecology, thermocline, vector-borne disease, phenotypic variation

The research emerged from the Global Access to Skin Health Observatory, known as SkinObservatory, a collaboration between the International League of Dermatological Societies (ILDS) and L’Oréal Dermatological Beauty. Representatives from 194 World Health Organization member countries were invited to participate, and respondents from 136 countries ultimately contributed data covering all four World Bank income classifications. Participants were asked to share insights on climate impacts and the observed prevalence of climate change-related skin diseases within their borders. Overall, 42.6 percent of responding countries reported changes in the prevalence or severity of skin disease attributable to climate change, but that headline figure conceals stark differences tied to national wealth and geography.

The income-based gradient was striking. More than half of low-income countries, 55.6 percent, reported climate-related changes in skin disease, as did 52.5 percent of lower-middle-income countries. By contrast, 43.8 percent of upper-middle-income countries and only 28.3 percent of high-income countries reported such changes. The pattern suggests that the nations least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions are the ones most likely to be witnessing dermatological consequences, a finding the study authors describe as a stark illustration of global inequality. Geographical disparities were equally pronounced. Changes were most frequently reported in the Western Pacific Region at 64.7 percent, followed by the Eastern Mediterranean and South-East Asian regions at 60.0 percent each. In the European Region, only 16.1 percent of respondents reported such changes, while in the African Region, 42.9 percent of respondents were unsure about the impact of climate change on skin disease, a figure that highlights potential gaps in surveillance and evidence rather than an absence of impact.

Among the 58 countries that reported climate-associated effects on skin disease, the specific conditions affected paint a detailed clinical picture. Heat rashes topped the list, with 81.0 percent of these countries reporting increases. Inflammatory skin diseases followed closely, with 75.9 percent reporting rises. Changes in infectious diseases were reported by 62.1 percent of affected countries, and half of them, 50.0 percent, specifically reported changes in vector-borne diseases, the category that includes illnesses transmitted by mosquitoes, ticks, and other arthropods. These numbers suggest that climate change acts on the skin through multiple simultaneous pathways, some of them direct physiological effects of heat and humidity, and others mediated by ecological shifts in the distribution of disease-carrying organisms.

Study author Dr. Esther Freeman, the L’Oréal/CeraVe Endowed Chair of Global Health Dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Director of Global Health Dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, emphasized that the skin occupies a unique position in the body’s encounter with a changing environment. “We often think about the effects of extreme weather on heatstroke, cardiovascular problems and respiratory diseases, but the skin is our front line to climate change,” she said. Her point is more than rhetorical. The skin is the largest organ of the human body and the primary physical interface between internal physiology and the external world, which means it registers environmental stressors first and most visibly. Rising ambient temperatures and elevated humidity increase sweating, which can macerate the skin barrier and provoke irritation, while heat, air pollution, and other environmental exposures may trigger or worsen inflammatory conditions such as eczema and other dermatitis syndromes.

The vector-borne dimension adds another layer of complexity. As Dr. Freeman explained, shifts in temperature and rainfall can alter the habitats of mosquitoes, ticks, and other disease vectors, potentially allowing them to survive in places where they were previously uncommon. This ecological expansion has direct dermatological consequences, from bites and infestations to the cutaneous manifestations of diseases such as dengue, leishmaniasis, and other infections whose geographic ranges track the movements of their arthropod or animal hosts. Changes in rainfall patterns and flooding can also influence waterborne and soil-related infections that present through the skin, while climate-related migration and ecosystem disruption can move susceptible populations into contact with pathogens and environmental hazards they have never previously encountered. The study’s authors note that these interacting mechanisms, thermal, inflammatory, infectious, and demographic, together explain why the reported effects span such a broad range of conditions rather than clustering around a single disease category.

Underlying all of these mechanisms is a compounding vulnerability that the researchers describe in sobering terms. “Despite contributing the least to climate change, countries with fewer resources were more likely to report climate-related dermatological changes,” the authors noted. “This is especially alarming since these are often the same countries with the least capacity to adapt.” Many lower-income countries are located in regions experiencing extreme heat, flooding, and changing rainfall patterns, while simultaneously facing limited access to healthcare, dermatologists, medicines, and public health infrastructure. The result is a convergence in which the greatest environmental health risks coexist with health systems that have the fewest resources to prevent, identify, and treat disease. In practical terms, a country where heat and humidity are intensifying may have only a handful of trained dermatologists for its entire population, few diagnostic laboratories, and constrained supplies of topical and systemic therapies, making even well-characterized conditions far harder to manage as their prevalence climbs.

The finding that 42.9 percent of African Region respondents were unsure about climate impacts on skin disease deserves particular attention. Uncertainty at this scale is itself a data point, signaling that surveillance systems and research capacity in parts of the continent may be insufficient to detect and characterize changes that are very likely occurring. Without reliable baseline data on disease prevalence, health authorities cannot distinguish genuine climate-driven trends from background variation, cannot allocate resources efficiently, and cannot evaluate whether interventions are working. The study’s authors argue that this evidence gap is not a peripheral concern but a central obstacle to protecting skin health in the era of climate change, and they call for stronger surveillance, education, and locally tailored strategies, particularly in resource-limited settings where the need is greatest.

The response the researchers propose is deliberately practical. “We need to start treating skin health as part of climate-health preparedness,” Dr. Freeman concluded. “This means strengthening surveillance so changes can be detected earlier, improving education and awareness among healthcare professionals and communities and developing adaptation strategies that reflect local climate exposures, disease patterns and health-system resources.” In other words, dermatology should be integrated into the same planning frameworks that governments already use for heat emergencies, vector control, and disaster response. Surveillance networks could track presentations such as heat rash, inflammatory flares, and vector-borne infections as climate indicators. Training programs could equip generalist health workers in underserved regions to recognize and manage climate-sensitive skin conditions. Adaptation measures, from cooling infrastructure to vector control tailored to local ecology, could be designed with dermatological outcomes explicitly in mind rather than treated as an afterthought.

Presented at the EADV Congress 2026, held in Vienna and online from 30 September to 3 October 2026, the SkinObservatory findings arrive at a moment when the medical community is increasingly recognizing that climate change is a present-tense clinical reality rather than a forecast. The study’s global scope, 136 countries, four income groups, and multiple WHO regions, gives it a breadth that few previous assessments of climate and skin disease have achieved, and its central message is difficult to ignore: the skin, the body’s front line against the environment, is already registering the consequences of a warming world, and the places being hit hardest are those with the fewest tools to respond. Further details of the observatory and its ongoing work are available at skinobservatory.org, where the collaboration between the ILDS and L’Oréal Dermatological Beauty continues to map access to skin health care worldwide.

Subject of Research: The global impact of climate change on the prevalence and severity of skin diseases

Article Title: New study reveals major impact of climate change on skin health worldwide

Article References: New study reveals major impact of climate change on skin health worldwide. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: climate change, skin health, dermatology, EADV Congress 2026, SkinObservatory, global health, heat rash, inflammatory skin disease, vector-borne disease, health inequality, surveillance, Esther Freeman

Aedes japonicus is one of several so-called Aedes invasive mosquitoes, or AIMs, that have spread rapidly across Europe in recent decades. Native to East Asia, the species has colonised large parts of central and western Europe since its first detections on the continent, establishing populations in countries including Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Slovenia. In Italy, the mosquito had until now been reported only in the northern part of the country, where it has been expanding alongside another Asian invader, Aedes koreicus. The presence of both species in territories bordering Tuscany raised concerns among public health entomologists that the insects would follow the main transport corridors linking northern Italy to the central regions, and the new study set out to test exactly that hypothesis.

The survey was deliberately designed around the geography of invasion. Rather than sampling randomly across Tuscany, the researchers focused on the province of Massa-Carrara, the northernmost province of the region, and specifically on small villages situated along the roads that connect Tuscany with the adjacent regions where Aedes japonicus and Aedes koreicus had already been reported. This strategy reflects a well-established principle in invasion biology: human-mediated transport along road networks is one of the principal drivers of mosquito range expansion, and the first footholds of a new species are most likely to appear along the routes that funnel traffic from invaded areas into uninvaded ones. The team conducted the fieldwork over just two days, inspecting potential breeding habitats for adult mosquitoes, larvae and pupae.

The results were unambiguous. Morphological identification of 90 adult mosquitoes and 35 larvae, combined with molecular analyses performed on eggs, larvae, pupae and one adult, confirmed the presence of Aedes japonicus japonicus in five municipalities of northern Tuscany. The molecular work relied on standard genetic markers used in mosquito identification, including the internal transcribed spacer 1 region of the nuclear genome and the cytochrome c oxidase subunit I gene of the mitochondrial genome, amplified by polymerase chain reaction. This combination of morphological and molecular confirmation is important because several invasive Aedes species are morphologically similar, particularly in their immature stages, and misidentification can lead to costly delays in surveillance and control responses.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the finding is what it implies about how long the species has been present. Despite the extremely short duration of the survey, the researchers detected Aedes japonicus across multiple sites and in several different types of artificial breeding containers, including buckets, tyres and a fountain basin. Finding the mosquito in so many locations and habitat types within a two-day window suggests that it is not a recent arrival confined to a single introduction point but is already firmly established in the area. The detection of immature stages co-occurring with larvae of other species, including the Asian tiger mosquito Aedes albopictus, the common house mosquito Culex pipiens, Culex hortensis and Culiseta annulata, further indicates that the species is breeding successfully in its new environment rather than merely being transported there incidentally.

This ecological flexibility is a hallmark of the species and a key reason for its invasion success. Aedes japonicus thrives in container habitats of both natural and artificial origin, tolerates cooler temperatures than many other invasive mosquitoes, and can exploit a wide range of water-holding structures in both rural and peri-urban settings. The fact that the Tuscany survey found it in buckets, tyres and a fountain basin confirms this plasticity in the Italian context and suggests that the species has the potential to spread further south, where it may encounter increasingly favourable climatic conditions during the cooler parts of the year. The coexistence of Aedes japonicus with the Asian tiger mosquito, which is now ubiquitous across Italy, also raises ecological questions about competition between the two invaders, since both exploit similar larval habitats.

From a public health perspective, the establishment of Aedes japonicus in Central Italy carries two main implications. The first is nuisance: the species is an aggressive day-biting mosquito whose females readily feed on humans, and its presence in residential areas can significantly degrade quality of life during the warm season. The second, and more consequential, is its potential role as a disease vector. While Aedes japonicus is not as efficient a vector of dengue or chikungunya as Aedes albopictus, it has been shown experimentally and in field studies to be competent for a range of arboviruses, including West Nile virus, and it has been implicated in the transmission ecology of other pathogens in its native and invaded ranges. The introduction of an additional competent vector into a region that already circulates West Nile virus and other mosquito-borne pathogens adds a new layer of complexity to vector-borne disease risk assessment in Italy.

The authors of the study argue that these findings highlight the need for active surveillance specifically targeting Aedes invasive mosquitoes in Central Italy. Traditional mosquito monitoring in Italy has historically centred on the Asian tiger mosquito, which arrived in the country in the early 1990s and is now monitored through extensive ovitrap networks. However, the detection methods and thresholds optimised for Aedes albopictus are not necessarily suited to detecting a newly arriving species at low density. The Tuscany survey demonstrates the value of a different approach: targeted sampling along invasion corridors, informed by the known distribution of the species in neighbouring territories, can detect a new arrival quickly. The researchers acknowledge the contribution of colleagues from neighbouring regions who provided information on the distribution of invasive Aedes mosquitoes near the Tuscan border and offered suggestions on sampling strategies for the timely detection of Aedes japonicus and Aedes koreicus.

The study was supported by the Tuscany region through a fund dedicated to the regional entomological network for the protection of public health, developed and restructured for the 2026 to 2027 biennium. This institutional backing reflects a growing recognition among Italian regional authorities that invasive mosquito surveillance is a core public health function rather than a purely academic exercise. As climate change alters temperature and precipitation patterns across the Mediterranean, and as international trade and travel continue to move mosquitoes and their eggs across borders, the window for early detection and response is shrinking. The rapid spread of Aedes koreicus through northern Italy in recent years, following a pattern similar to that of Aedes japonicus elsewhere in Europe, illustrates how quickly an established invader can consolidate its range once it gains a foothold.

The first report of Aedes japonicus in Central Italy is therefore best understood not as an isolated discovery but as a milestone in an ongoing continental invasion. The species has now bridged the gap between its northern Italian strongholds and the central regions of the peninsula, and its presence in five municipalities of northern Tuscany, confirmed by both morphology and genetics, indicates that the invasion front has moved decisively southward. Whether the mosquito will establish permanent populations further into Tuscany and beyond will depend on climatic suitability, the availability of breeding habitats and the effectiveness of the surveillance and control measures that regional authorities put in place. What is already clear, the researchers conclude, is that the species is firmly established in northern Tuscany, that it exploits the same artificial containers that have fuelled the spread of other invasive mosquitoes, and that sustained, targeted monitoring is now essential to track and, where possible, contain its further expansion.

Subject of Research: First detection of the invasive mosquito Aedes japonicus in Central Italy and its implications for surveillance and public health

Article Title: New evidence of an ongoing invasion: first report of Aedes japonicus in Central Italy

Article References: Del Lesto, I., Chiavacci, M., De Liberato, C., Rondón, S., Ottolini, N., Carioti, V., Magliano, A., Porchia, B. R., & Romiti, F. (2026). New evidence of an ongoing invasion: first report of Aedes japonicus in Central Italy. Parasites & Vectors. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13071-026-07709-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13071-026-07709-2

Keywords: Aedes japonicus, Asian bush mosquito, invasive mosquitoes, Tuscany, Italy, vector-borne disease, entomological surveillance, biological invasion, Aedes albopictus, public health, mosquito vectors, Massa-Carrara