Intervention reducing malaria parasite load in vector mosquitoes: no impact on Plasmodium falciparum extrinsic incubation period and the survival of Anopheles gambiae: analysis data and code

In the fight against malaria, transmission blocking interventions (TBIs) such as transmission blocking vaccines or drugs, are promising approaches to complement conventional tools. They aim to prevent the infection of vectors and thereby reduce the subsequent exposure of a human population to infectious mosquitoes. The effectiveness of these approaches has been shown to depend on the initial intensity of infection in mosquitoes, often measured as the mean number of oocysts resulting from an infectious blood meal in absence of intervention. In mosquitoes exposed to a high intensity of infection, current TBI candidates are expected to be ineffective at completely blocking infection but will decrease parasite load and therefore, potentially also affect key parameters of vector transmission. The present study investigated the consequences of changes in oocyst intensity on subsequent parasite development and mosquito survival. To address this, we experimentally produced different intensities of infection for Anopheles gambiae females from Burkina Faso by diluting gametocytes from three natural Plasmodium falciparum local isolates and used a newly developed non-destructive method based on the exploitation of mosquito sugar feeding to track parasite and mosquito life history traits throughout sporogonic development. This dataset provides the code (for R software) and R data used for statistical analysis to estimate: the effect of parasite density on parasite extrinsic incubation period ; the effect of parasite density on mosquito survival ; the infection prevalence and intensity in mosquito gut at 7 days post blood meal (dpbm) ; the infection prevalence and intensity in mosquito head/thoraces upon death.