In the past 5-10 years, Venezuela has faced a severe economic crisis, precipitated by political instability and declining oil revenue. Public health provision has been affected particularly. In this Review, we assess the impact of Venezuela's health-care crisis on vector-borne diseases, and the spillover into neighbouring countries. Between 2000 and 2015, Venezuela witnessed a 359% increase in malaria cases, followed by a 71% increase in 2017 (411 586 cases) compared with 2016 (240 613). Neighbouring countries, such as Brazil, have reported an escalating trend of imported malaria cases from Venezuela, from 1538 in 2014 to 3129 in 2017. In Venezuela, active Chagas disease transmission has been reported, with seroprevalence in children (<10 years), estimated to be as high as 12·5% in one community tested (n=64). Dengue incidence increased by more than four times between 1990 and 2016. The estimated incidence of chikungunya during its epidemic peak is 6975 cases per 100 000 people and that of Zika virus is 2057 cases per 100 000 people. The re-emergence of many vector-borne diseases represents a public health crisis in Venezuela and has the possibility of severely undermining regional disease elimination efforts. National, regional, and global authorities must take action to address these worsening epidemics and prevent their expansion beyond Venezuelan borders.

In a region of northeastern Amazonia, we find a species previously of minor importance, Anopheles marajoara, to be the principal malaria vector. In a total of five collections during 1996-97 in three replicated sites near the city of Macapá, Amapá state, this species occurs in much greater abundance compared with the presumed vector Anopheles darlingi. Also, a significantly higher proportion of An. marajoara is infected with malaria parasites, determined by the ELISA technique. This appears to be the result of increased abundance of An. marajoara due to alterations in land use, invasion of its primary breeding sites by human immigrants, and its anthropophilic behavior. This discovery highlights one of the challenges of Neotropical malaria control, namely that the targeting of specific vectors may be complicated by a changing mosaic of different locally important vectors and their interactions with human populations.

The complete sequences of the mitochondrial genomes (mtDNA) of members of the northern and southern genotypes of Anopheles (Nyssorhynchus) darlingi were used for comparative studies to estimate the time to the most recent common ancestor for modern anophelines, to evaluate differentiation within this taxon, and to seek evidence of incipient speciation.

Interest in larval source management (LSM) as an adjunct intervention to control and eliminate malaria transmission has recently increased mainly because long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs) and indoor residual spray (IRS) are ineffective against exophagic and exophilic mosquitoes. In Amazonian Peru, the identification of the most productive, positive water bodies would increase the impact of targeted mosquito control on aquatic life stages. The present study explores the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) for identifying Nyssorhynchus darlingi (formerly Anopheles darlingi) breeding sites with high-resolution imagery (~0.02m/pixel) and their multispectral profile in Amazonian Peru. Our results show that high-resolution multispectral imagery can discriminate a profile of water bodies where Ny. darlingi is most likely to breed (overall accuracy 86.73%- 96.98%) with a moderate differentiation of spectral bands. This work provides proof-of-concept of the use of high-resolution images to detect malaria vector breeding sites in Amazonian Peru and such innovative methodology could be crucial for LSM malaria integrated interventions. The most efficient malaria vector in the Latin American region is Nyssorhynchus darlingi (formerly Anopheles darlingi). In Amazonian Peru, where malaria is endemic, Ny. darlingi feeds both indoors and outdoors (endophagy, exophagy), depending on the local environment, and rests outdoors (exophily). LLINs and IRS, the most common tools employed for vector control, target endophagic and endophilic mosquitoes. Thus, they are only partially effective against Ny. darlingi. Control of the aquatic stages of vector mosquitoes, larval source management (LSM), targets the most productive breeding sites nearest to human habitation. In four riverine communities, we used drones with high-resolution imagery as a key initial step to analyze water bodies within the estimated flight range of Ny. darlingi, ~ 1 km. We found distinctive spectral profiles for water bodies that were positive versus negative for Ny. darlingi. The methodology and analysis reported here provide the basis for testing whether LSM can be combined successfully with LLINs and IRS to contribute to the elimination of transmission in malaria hotspots in the Amazon.

Malaria is a vector-borne disease that is a great burden on the poorest and most marginalized communities of the tropical and subtropical world. Approximately 41 species of Anopheline mosquitoes can effectively spread species of Plasmodium parasites that cause human malaria. Proposing a natural classification for the subfamily Anophelinae has been a continuous effort, addressed using both morphology and DNA sequence data. The monophyly of the genus Anopheles , and phylogenetic placement of the genus Bironella , subgenera Kerteszia , Lophopodomyia and Stethomyia within the subfamily Anophelinae, remain in question. To understand the classification of Anophelinae, we inferred the phylogeny of all three genera ( Anopheles , Bironella , Chagasia ) and major subgenera by analysing the amino acid sequences of the 13 protein coding genes of 150 newly sequenced mitochondrial genomes of Anophelinae and 18 newly sequenced Culex species as outgroup taxa, supplemented with 23 mitogenomes from GenBank. Our analyses generally place genus Bironella within the genus Anopheles , which implies that the latter as it is currently defined is not monophyletic. With some inconsistencies, Bironella was placed within the major clade that includes Anopheles , Cellia , Kerteszia , Lophopodomyia , Nyssorhynchus and Stethomyia , which were found to be monophyletic groups within Anophelinae. Our findings provided robust evidence for elevating the monophyletic groupings Kerteszia , Lophopodomyia , Nyssorhynchus and Stethomyia to genus level; genus Anopheles to include subgenera Anopheles , Baimaia , Cellia and Christya ; Anopheles parvus to be placed into a new genus; Nyssorhynchus to be elevated to genus level; the genus Nyssorhynchus to include subgenera Myzorhynchella and Nyssorhynchus ; Anopheles atacamensis and Anopheles pictipennis to be transferred from subgenus Nyssorhynchus to subgenus Myzorhynchella ; and subgenus Nyssorhynchus to encompass the remaining species of Argyritarsis and Albimanus Sections.