An Aedes aegypti mosquito with purple powder used to mark the animal in a conduct check. Credit score: Matt Cashore/College of Notre Dame
The signs come on shortly—acute fever, adopted by debilitating joint ache that may final for months. Although hardly ever deadly, the chikungunya virus, a mosquito-borne sickness, will be notably extreme for high-risk people, together with newborns and older adults.
Whereas the virus is widespread in tropical and subtropical areas, together with Asia, Africa and South America, public well being officers have been monitoring reported infections in Europe and, in September, a confirmed case in Lengthy Island, New York.
Outbreaks of chikungunya have prompted the Facilities for Illness Management to problem well being notices to vacationers certain for Bangladesh; Cuba; Guangdong Province, China; Kenya; Madagascar; Somalia; and Sri Lanka.
In Guangdong Province, an “unprecedented” outbreak just lately prompted authorities officers in China to mandate quarantines for anybody suspected of being contaminated by the virus, spraying people with mosquito repellent and spraying impacted buildings and different areas with insecticide.
In a brand new research, revealed in Science Advances, researchers on the College of Notre Dame analyzed greater than 80 outbreaks of chikungunya virus to enhance prediction of future outbreaks and inform vaccine trial growth.
“Chikungunya outbreaks are unpredictable in both size and severity,” mentioned Alex Perkins, the Ann and Daniel Monahan Collegiate Professor of infectious illness epidemiology within the Division of Organic Sciences, and co-author of the research. “You can have one outbreak that infects just a few people, and another in a similar setting that infects tens of thousands. That unpredictability is what makes public health planning—and vaccine development—so difficult.”
For the research, Alexander Meyer, a postdoctoral researcher in Perkins’ lab and lead creator of the research, and a crew of researchers reconstructed and analyzed 86 chikungunya outbreaks, creating the most important comparative dataset of its type.
“Instead of looking at outbreaks in isolation, looking at many, all of which varied in size and severity, allowed us to search for patterns among them,” Meyer mentioned.
Chikungunya was first recognized within the Fifties. Outbreaks have develop into more and more frequent and widespread, however they’re additionally sporadic and tough to foretell, posing a problem to public well being officers in the case of planning for and stopping infections.
Modifications in outbreaks of chikungunya, transmitted by bites from contaminated mosquitoes—Aedes aegypti or Aedes albopictus are the first vectors—and different mosquito-borne sicknesses are sometimes thought-about in relation to local weather change, as hotter, extra humid circumstances can promote mosquito exercise.
However Perkins mentioned this research confirmed that local weather is not essentially a very powerful issue when making an attempt to foretell the severity of an outbreak of illness attributable to a virus like chikungunya.
“Climate factors like temperature and rainfall can tell us where outbreaks are possible, but this study shows that they don’t help very much in predicting how severe they will be,” he mentioned. “Local conditions matter—things like housing quality, mosquito density and how communities respond. Some variation is simply due to chance. That randomness is part of the story, too.”
Presently, solely two vaccines for chikungunya have obtained regulatory approval—however they don’t seem to be broadly out there in areas the place the virus is commonest.
That’s the reason having such a big, complete dataset is so useful in the case of vaccine growth, Perkins mentioned.
To check for efficacy, vaccine makers want correct predictions of the place an outbreak would possibly happen earlier than it occurs, to conduct trials and monitor whether or not candidate vaccines are efficient.
The research demonstrates how a extra complete evaluation of previous outbreaks may help public well being officers put together for future outbreaks, thereby defending weak populations and aiding vaccine growth.
Extra data:
Alexander D. Meyer et al, Predictability of infectious illness outbreak severity: Chikungunya as a case research, Science Advances (2025). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adt5419
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