Filipe Romero Rebello Moreira, Mariane Talon de Menezes, Clarisse Salgado-Benvindo, Charles Whittaker, Victoria Cox, Nilani Chandradeva, Hury Hellen Souza de Paula, André Frederico Martins, Raphael Rangel das Chagas, Rodrigo Decembrino Vargas Brasil, Darlan da Silva Cândido, Alice Laschuk Herlinger, Marisa de Oliveira Ribeiro, Monica Barcellos Arruda, Patricia Alvarez, Marcelo Calado de Paula Tôrres, Ilaria Dorigatti, Oliver Brady, Carolina Moreira Voloch, Amilcar Tanuri, Felipe Iani, William Marciel de Souza, Sergian Vianna Cardozo, Nuno Rodrigues Faria, Renato Santana Aguiar
Since 2014, Brazil has experienced an unprecedented epidemic caused by chikungunya virus (CHIKV), with several waves of East-Central-South-African (ECSA) lineage transmission reported across the country. In 2018, Rio de Janeiro state, the third most populous state in Brazil, reported 41% of all chikungunya cases in the country. Here we use evolutionary and epidemiological analysis to estimate the timescale of CHIKV-ECSA-American lineage and its epidemiological patterns in Rio de Janeiro. We show that the CHIKV-ECSA outbreak in Rio de Janeiro derived from two distinct clades introduced from the Northeast region in mid-2015 (clade RJ1, n = 63/67 genomes from Rio de Janeiro) and mid-2017 (clade RJ2, n = 4/67)...
September 28, 2023: PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases