Fig 1.
The location of the study villages in the Province of Zagora south-eastern Morocco and the location of the active Meriones shawi burrows identified in the four villages at the start of the study (green dots), in relation to the location of the human habitations (yellow dots). Situation as of May 2020.
The baseline administrative map is derived from https://diva-gis.org/data.html and the basemap is OpenStreetMap https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=8/50.730/5.367. The boundaries shown on the map do not imply any judgment or position on the legal status of any country or territory.
Table 1.
Total number and row percentage of sand flies (male and female combined) collected per village and place of collection.
Fig 2.
Number of collected sand flies (males and females combined) presented as boxplots providing an overview of the medians and interquartile ranges of the counts per trap over three nights by village, collection place and survey.
The red vertical lines indicate the application of fipronil bait in the intervention villages Ait Mnad and Oulad Msaad. Timsla and Bouzergane were the control villages.
Fig 3.
Overview of the proportional presence of sand fly species in the four study villages.
Phlebotomus spp include Ph. africana, Ph. bergeroti, Ph. chabaudi, Ph. chadlii, Ph. kazeruni, Ph. longeroni. Sergentomyia spp. include S. clydei, S. dreyfussi, S. fallax, S. lewisi, S. minuta, and S. schwetzi. The basemap is obtained from OpenStreetMap (https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=7/32.059/-8.405) sources using the read_osm function in R.
Fig 4.
Predicted female sand fly counts and their 95% confidence intervals in function of the application number and the village type (control, intervention) by sampling location (field, outdoor, and indoor) based on the GLMM model.
Application 0 refers to the baseline, i.e., before any intervention.
Table 2.
The effect of village type (control or intervention), application number (0, 1, 2 or 3) and their interaction on the female sand fly counts based on a GLMM with negative binomial distribution. 95 CI = 95% confidence interval.
Table 3.
Overview of the Leishmania spp. prevalence in blood-fed sand flies and Leishmania species detection in Leishmania-specific SL-RNA positive samples and the identification of the Leishmania spp. based on the ITS-1 sequencing.