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Twenty-Seven Years of Field Studies on Dengue and Aedes aegypti in Latin America

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History of Arbovirology: Memories from the Field

Abstract

This chapter provides a chronology and partial memoir of the career of Amy C. Morrison over the previous 27 years conducting research on dengue virus transmission dynamics and its vector Aedes aegypti in Puerto Rico and Thailand and 22 years in Peruvian Amazon in Iquitos, Peru. She describes how the influences of prominent arbovirologists and medical entomologists as well as good timing and luck led her to focus on Ae. aegypti. For young scientists, it is an example of how networking and prior experiences lead to new opportunities. After a PhD on the bionomics of the sand fly vector of American visceral leishmaniasis at the Yale Arbovirus Unit, she moved to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Dengue Branch for her first postdoc, where she published “Exploratory space-time analysis of reported dengue cases during an outbreak in Florida, Puerto Rico, 1991–1992,” the first use of spatial statistical analysis on the spatial distribution of dengue cases and met Tom Scott with whom she would work with for 20 years in Iquitos. This study and approach would become a key component of the first NIH grant she and Tom wrote that initiated the Iquitos Project Dengue Research Program and collaboration with the US Navy. From 1998 to 2019, Dr. Morrison has conducted eight large-scale longitudinal cohort studies of which four were vector control intervention trials measuring the impact of the intervention on virus transmission. Rather than focusing on all the scientific contributions of this productive program, she describes some of the day-to-day activities of the Aedes aegypti survey team, including some personal stories, which remained intact until 2019 when they completed their work on a cluster randomized control trial (cRCT) determining the protective efficacy of a spatial repellent product against Aedes-borne viral disease, the largest and most complex project executed by the team. She describes many of the challenges associated with working in the field including the fact that all her trials have had to account for emergency vector control activities carried out by government programs. The program has been able to develop a strong relationship with their government counterparts to coordinate research and control activities. She describes the integration of qualitative research and its value to the overall research program. She concludes with a description of her role as an external advisor on dengue and Aedes aegypti and some of the key lessons learned from many years of field work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA

    Amy C. Morrison

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  1. Amy C. Morrison
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Pathology, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, TX, USA

    Nikos Vasilakis

  2. School of Public Health, University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, NY, USA

    Laura D. Kramer

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Morrison, A.C. (2023). Twenty-Seven Years of Field Studies on Dengue and Aedes aegypti in Latin America. In: Vasilakis, N., Kramer, L.D. (eds) History of Arbovirology: Memories from the Field. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21999-3_10

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