**Abstract**

Mosquito-borne viral diseases are infections transmitted by the bite of infected mosquitoes. The burden of these diseases is highest in tropical and subtropical areas and they disproportionately affect the poorest populations. Since 2014, major outbreaks of dengue, chikungunya, yellow fever and Zika have afflicted populations and overwhelmed health systems in many countries. Distribution of mosquito-borne diseases is determined by complex demographic, environmental and social factors, causing diseases to emerge in countries where they were previously unknown. Coupling genomic diagnostics and epidemiology to innovative digital disease detection platforms raises the possibility of an open, global, digital pathogen surveillance system. Considering pathogen surveillance in mind, real-time sequencing, bioinformatics tools and the combination of genomic and epidemiological data from viral infections can give essential information for understanding the past and the future of an epidemic, making possible to establish an effective surveillance framework on tracking the spread of infections to other geographic regions.

**Keywords:** mosquito-borne viral diseases, arboviral infections, genomics epidemiology, next-generation sequencing, genomic surveillance, viral pathogens

#### **1. Introduction**

Mosquito-borne viral diseases have lately integrated worldwide headlines since the emergence of arbovirus outbreaks in big urban areas. According to the World Health Organization, more than 17% of all infectious diseases registered worldwide are represented by vector-borne diseases, and they account for more than 700,000 deaths annually [1]. Due to this scenario of increasing cases number and expansion to new areas, the spread of infectious diseases was listed second in the top 10 risks in term of impact according to the Global Risks 2015 report [2].

Mosquitos of the genus *Aedes* have been responsible for the emergence and re-emergence of many arboviral diseases worldwide [3]. The species *Aedes aegypti* is the main vector species responsible for the major arbovirus epidemics recorded in recent years [4]. The species *A. aegypti* and *A. albopictus* are possibly suitable to survive and establish in 215 countries/territories, and their expanding range

is underlined by the increasing number of countries reporting transmission of mosquito-borne viruses. Transmissions of arboviruses, such as Zika, dengue, chikungunya, yellow fever, and Rift Valley fever, have been reported in 85, 111, 106, 43, and 39 countries, respectively [5]. Projections indicated that 3.83 billion people are living in areas prone to transmission of dengue and it is predicted that by 2050 large increases in dengue suitability will be seen in southern Africa and in the Sahel in West Africa [14]. Bhatt et al. projected the global burden of dengue around the world whose estimate indicated that 96 million dengue infections occur per year worldwide and this number represents infections that manifest at any level of the disease severity [6]. the Americas, comprising North and South America, registered more than 2 million dengue cases in 2016, and more than 1.4 million cases in 2019 [7]. For chikungunya fever, the Americas registered more than 94,000 cases in 2018, and in that same region, Zika fever accounted for more than 650,000 cases in 2016 [8, 9]. High number of cases of arboviral diseases was also registered in other regions in recent years, such as in the western pacific region where more than 375,000 suspected dengue cases were reported in 2016 [10]. In Africa, the government of Congo reported 6149 suspected cases of chikungunya until April 2019, and more than 13,000 chikungunya cases were reported in Sudan until October 2018 [11, 12]. The increasing in frequency and distribution of arboviral diseases in recent years represents a worrying burden not only for the public health system, but also for the economic sector [3]. Some estimates of the economic costs of arboviral infections have been made and for the case of dengue infections, it has been estimated that the median cost of all reported dengue hospital admissions registered in a municipality from Brazil was US\$ 259.9 per hospitalization [13, 17]. Also, in Maldives, in the Indian Ocean, dengue fever represented a total cost of \$3 million in 2015 [14]. Another estimate indicated that West Nile fever hospitalized cases in US represented a total cumulative cost of \$778 million between 1999 and 2012 [15].

Dengue and chikungunya are two arboviral diseases present in the list of neglected tropical diseases from the World Health Organization. Neglected tropical diseases are a group of diseases that have received insufficient public attention, strive in tropical and subtropical areas, and strongly affect populations living in poverty [12]. It is argued that arboviruses can be considered a group of neglected tropical diseases, since they can have a long-lasting impact in the health and economic life of affected populations [16]. Some studies have argued that socioeconomic factors and land-use changes associated with the effects of climate change and global travel, and trade modulate the dynamics of expansion of emerging e re-emerging mosquito-borne diseases [17–20]. Movement of people between neighboring countries has been considered a good predictor for chikungunya spread in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean [14]. The expansion of the geographic distribution of arbovirus has significant negative impact on public health in many regions of the world. As measures to reduce such impacts, it has been argued about the relevance to public health of the implementation of a surveillance system that monitors virus diffusion and the appearance of new genetic variants [21]. In this sense, the use of genomic sequencing data and bioinformatics has been employed in the study of virus evolution, aiming to elucidate phylogenetic relationships and patterns of virus spread during an epidemic [22].
