=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3293/paper9
|storemode=property
|title=Quantitative Assessment of the Entry through Mechanical Transport in Aircraft of Rift Valley Fever Virus-Infected Mosquitoes into Previously Unaffected Areas - Abstract
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3293/paper9.pdf
|volume=Vol-3293
|authors=Maria Eleni Filippitzi,Claude Saugerman
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/haicta/FilippitziS22
}}
==Quantitative Assessment of the Entry through Mechanical Transport in Aircraft of Rift Valley Fever Virus-Infected Mosquitoes into Previously Unaffected Areas - Abstract==
<pdf width="1500px">https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3293/paper9.pdf</pdf>
<pre>
Quantitative Assessment of the Entry through Mechanical
Transport in Aircraft of Rift Valley Fever Virus-Infected
Mosquitoes into Previously Unaffected Areas - Abstract
Maria Eleni Filippitzi 1 and Claude Saugerman 2
1
  Laboratory of Animal Health Economics, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki,
Greece
2
  Research Unit of Epidemiology and Risk Analysis Applied to Veterinary Sciences, Fundamental and Applied
Research for Animals and Health (FARAH) Center, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Liege,
Belgium


                 Summary 1
                 Rift Valley Fever (RVF) is a zoonotic disease of significant international health concern and
                 considered as an emerging risk to areas like Europe, where no RVF outbreaks in humans or
                 animals have been reported. Building upon previous qualitative research, this study aimed at
                 quantitatively assessing the risk of RVF virus introduction into previously unaffected areas via
                 virus-carrying mosquitoes traveling in commercial aircraft from RVF-affected countries,
                 which has been reported as a non-negligible pathway. Using the United Kingdom (UK) as an
                 example of a RVF-free European country receiving flights from affected countries and
                 considering African countries as examples of RVF-affected countries, the study built a
                 stochastic step-by-step approach, including all relevant variables and applicable to a broader
                 extent of cases. The model framework describing the pathway of RVFV introduction of interest
                 to this study is presented in Figure 1. This model estimated that, given our assumptions, when
                 an outbreak occurs, the total number of RVFV-infected mosquitoes that are mechanically
                 transported in aircraft, in direct flights from RVF-affected East African countries to the UK,
                 between May and October, has a most likely value of N = 0 and an average value of N = 68
                 (95% CI: 0–337). This estimate is considered as low but not negligible. The model can be
                 easily scaled up to other European countries by amending appropriately country-specific
                 variables (e.g., number of flights between countries) in order to map the areas/airports of higher
                 risk (e.g., South Europe), inform risk management per country accordingly and adopt risk-
                 mitigation measures.




Proceedings of HAICTA 2022, September 22–25, 2022, Athens, Greece
EMAIL: mefilippi@vet.auth.gr (A. 1); claude.saegerman@ulg.ac.be (A. 2)
ORCID: 0000-0001-9287-698X (A. 1)
              ©️ 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors.
              Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
              CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)




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Figure 1: Model framework describing the introduction of RVFV-infected mosquitoes into an
EU country, mechanically transported by commercial aircraft originating from RVF-affected
countries

Keywords
Rift Valley Fever, vector-borne, quantitative risk assessment, cross-border




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