Katty Borrini Mayori

Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia | UPCH

Background: Rabies, a re-emerging zoonosis with the highest known human case fatality rate, has been largely absent from Peru, except for endemic circulation in the Puno region on the Bolivian border and re-emergence in Arequipa City in 2015, where it has persisted. In 2021, an outbreak occurred in the rapidly expanding city of El Pedregal near Are...

BACKGROUND The city of El Pedregal grew out of a desert, following an agricultural irrigation project in southern Peru. OBJECTIVES To describe infestation patterns by triatomines and bed bugs and their relationship to migration and urbanization. METHODS We conducted door-to-door entomological surveys for triatomines and bed bugs. We assessed spat...

The city of El Pedregal grew out of a desert, following an agricultural irrigation project in Southern Peru. We conducted door-to-door entomological surveys to document the emergence of triatomines and bed bugs into this new urban environment. We inspected 5,191 households for Triatoma infestans (known locally as the Chirimacha); 21 (0.41%) were in...

A canine rabies epidemic started in early 2015 in Arequipa, Peru and the rabies virus continues to circulate in the dog population. Some city residents who suffer dog bites do not seek care or do not complete indicated post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) regimens, increasing the risk of human rabies. The objectives of our study are to qualitatively ass...

Blood-sucking triatomine bugs transmit the protozoan parasite Trypanosoma cruzi, the etiologic agent of Chagas disease. We measured the prevalence of T. cruzi infection in 58,519 Triatoma infestans captured in residences in and near Arequipa, Peru. Among bugs from infected colonies, T. cruzi prevalence increased with stage from 12% in second instar...

Anthropogenic environmental alterations such as urbanization can threaten native populations as well as create novel environments that allow human pests and pathogens to thrive. As the number and size of urban environments increase globally, it is more important than ever to understand the dispersal dynamics of hosts, vectors and pathogens of zoono...

A canine rabies epidemic started in early 2015 in Arequipa, Peru; the rabies virus continues to circulate in the dog population. Some city residents who suffer dog bites do not seek care or do not complete indicated post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) regimens, increasing the risk of human rabies. The objectives of our study were to qualitatively asses...

Anthropogenic environmental alterations such as urbanization can threaten native populations as well as create novel environments that allow human pests and pathogens to thrive. As the number and size of urban environments increase globally, it is more important than ever to understand the dispersal dynamics of hosts, vectors and pathogens of zoono...

Background: Individual behavior change is a critical ingredient in efforts to improve global health. Central to the focus on behavior has been a growing understanding of how the human brain makes decisions, from motivations and mindsets to unconscious biases and cognitive shortcuts. Recent work in the field of behavioral economics and related fiel...

Changing environmental conditions, including those caused by human activities, reshape biological communities through both loss of native species and establishment of non-native species in the altered habitats. Dynamic interactions with the abiotic environment impact both immigration and initial establishment of non-native species into these altere...

Background Sexual reproduction provides an evolutionary advantageous mechanism that combines favorable mutations that have arisen in separate lineages into the same individual. This advantage is especially pronounced in microparasites as allelic reassortment among individuals caused by sexual reproduction promotes allelic diversity at immune evasio...

Triatomine vectors transmit Trypanosoma cruzi, the etiological agent of Chagas disease in humans. Transmission to humans typically occurs when contaminated triatomine feces come in contact with the bite site or mucosal membranes. In the Southern Cone of South America, where the highest burden of disease exists, Triatoma infestans is the principal v...

Changing environmental conditions, including those caused by human activities, reshape biological communities through both loss of native species and establishment of non-native species in the altered habitats. Dynamic interactions with the abiotic environment impact both immigration and initial establishment of non-native species into these altere...

Objective To assess the efficacy of strategies informed by behavioural economics for increasing participation in a vector control campaign, compared with current practice. Design Pragmatic cluster randomised controlled trial. Setting Arequipa, Peru. Participants 4922 households. Interventions Households were randomised to one of four arms: adva...

Individual behavior change is a critical ingredient in efforts to improve global health. Central to the focus on behavior has been a growing understanding of how the human brain makes decisions, from motivations and mindsets to unconscious biases and cognitive shortcuts. Recent work in the field of behavioral economics and related fields has contri...

Although not presently implicated as a vector of human pathogens, the common bed bug, Cimex lectularius, has been suspected of carrying human pathogens because of its close association with humans and its obligate hematophagy. Recently, we characterized the vectorial competence of C. lectularius for the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi, the causative age...

Background Canine rabies was reintroduced to the city of Arequipa, Peru in March 2015. The Ministry of Health has conducted a series of mass dog vaccination campaigns to contain the outbreak, but canine rabies virus transmission continues in Arequipa’s complex urban environment, putting the city’s 1 million inhabitants at risk of infection. The pro...

Resumen en español (Alternative language abstract). (PDF)

The resurgence of the common bedbug (Cimex lectularius) has created a difficult public health problem around the world. Recently, we showed the vectorial competence of C. lectularius into laboratory conditions, proving that the common bedbug can transmit Trypanosoma cruzi to mice and can get infected when fed on T. cruzi carrying mice. T.cruzi is t...

Guinea pigs are important reservoirs of Trypanosoma cruzi, the causative parasite of Chagas disease. Interestingly, captured colonies of T. infestans, the main vector of T. cruzi in the Southern Cone of South America, sporadically present with infection prevalence rates above 80%. Such high values are not consistent with the relatively short 7-8wee...

Faeces-mediated transmission of Trypanosoma cruzi (the aetiological agent of Chagas disease) by triatomine insects is extremely inefficient. Still, the parasite emerges frequently, and has infected millions of people and domestic animals. We synthesize here the results of field and laboratory studies of T. cruzi transmission conducted in and around...

Chagas disease is a vector-borne disease endemic in Latin America. Triatoma infestans, a common vector of this disease, has recently expanded its range into rapidly developing cities of Latin America. We aim to identify the environmental features that affect the colonization and dispersal of T. infestans in an urban environment. We amplified 13 com...

Chagas disease affects millions of people in Latin America. The control of this vector-borne disease focuses on halting transmission by reducing or eliminating insect vector populations. Most transmission of Trypanosoma cruzi, the causative agent of Chagas disease, involves insects living within or very close to households and feeding mostly on dom...

Populations of the common bed bug, Cimex lectularius, have recently undergone explosive growth. Bed bugs share many important traits with triatomine insects, but it remains unclear whether these similarities include the ability to transmit Trypanosoma cruzi, the etiologic agent of Chagas disease. Here, we show efficient and bidirectional transmissi...

Modern cities represent one of the fastest growing ecosystems on the planet. Urbanization occurs in stages; each stage characterized by a distinct habitat that may be more or less susceptible to the establishment of disease vector populations and the transmission of vector-borne pathogens. We performed longitudinal entomological and epidemiological...

Background: Salivary proteins of Triatoma infestans elicit humoral immune responses in their vertebrate hosts. These immune responses indicate exposure to triatomines and thus can be a useful epidemiological tool to estimate triatomine infestation. In the present study, we analyzed antibody responses of guinea pigs to salivary antigens of differen...

Contact: alexandraschwarz@arcor.de 1. Salivary profile of the developmental stages of T. infestans Methods Crude saliva (1µg/lane) of all developmental stages of the Bolivian T. infestans strain was separated by 15% SDS-PAGE under reducing conditions (A). A phenogram from the electrophoretic saliva profiles of the different developmental stages of...

The increasing rate of biological invasions resulting from human transport or human-mediated changes to the environment has had devastating ecological and public health consequences. The kissing bug, Triatoma infestans, has dispersed through the Peruvian city of Arequipa. The biological invasion of this insect has resulted in a public health crisis...

The vector of Chagas disease, Triatoma infestans, is largely controlled by the household application of pyrethroid insecticides. Because effective, large-scale insecticide application is costly and necessitates numerous trained personnel, alternative control techniques are badly needed. We compared the residual effect of organophosphate-based insec...

CONCLUSIONES Reportes previos acerca de la parasitemia de T. cruzi en cuyes indican una duración de aproximadamente 10 semanas. Estos reportes no consideran las condiciones de campo en la que los parásitos estan expuestos a y posiblemente estimulados por la saliva de los triatominos cada vez que el vector se alimenta de un animal infectado. Nosotro...

Chagas disease is endemic in the rural areas of southern Peru and a growing urban problem in the regional capital of Arequipa, population ∼860,000. It is unclear how to implement cost-effective screening programs across a large urban and periurban environment. We compared four alternative screening strategies in 18 periurban communities, testing in...

Control of the Chagas disease vector, Triatoma infestans, relies on the application of pyrethroid insecticides, especially deltamethrin. We performed laboratory studies to determine whether a T. infestans nymph that comes into contact with a deltamethrin-treated surface horizontally transfers the insecticide to subsequent triatomines. We found that...

We used sentinel animal enclosures to measure the rate of infestation by the Chagas disease vector, Triatoma infestans, in an urban community of Arequipa, Peru, and to evaluate the effect of deltamethrin-impregnated netting on that rate. Impregnated netting decreased the rate of infestation of sentinel enclosures (rate ratio, 0.23; 95% confidence i...