Modelling the temperature dependent extrinsic incubation period of West Nile Virus using Bayesian time delay models.

West Nile Virus (WNV) is a mosquito-borne pathogen that primarily infects birds. Infections can spillover to humans and cause a spectrum of clinical symptoms, including WNV neuroinvasive disease. The extrinsic incubation period (EIP) is the time taken for a mosquito to become infectious following the ingestion of an infected blood meal. Characterising how the EIP varies with temperature is an essential part of predicting the impact and transmission dynamics of WNV. We re-analyse existing experimental data using Bayesian time delay models, allowing us to account for variation in how quickly individual mosquitoes become infectious with WNV. In these experiments, cohorts of Culex pipiens mosquitoes were infected with WNV and kept under different temperature conditions, being checked for disseminated infection at defined timepoints. We find that EIPs are best described with a Weibull distribution and become shorter log-linearly with temperature. Under 18ºC, less than 1% of infected Cx. pipiens had a disseminated infection after 5 days, compared to 9.73% (95% CrI: 7.97 to 11.54) at 25ºC and 42.20% (95% CrI: 38.32 to 46.60) at 30ºC. In the hottest experimental temperature treatment (32ºC), the EIP

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Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.