A longitudinal study of malaria vectors aiming to describe the intensity of transmission was carried out in five villages of Southern Venezuela between January 1999-April 2000. The man-biting, sporozoite and entomological inoculation rates (EIR) were calculated based on 121 all-night collections of anophelines landing on humans, CDC light traps and ultra violet up-draft traps. A total of 6,027 female mosquitoes representing seven species were collected. The most abundant species were
Anopheles marajoara
Galvão & Damasceno (56.7%) and
Anopheles darlingi
Root (33%), which together accounted for 89.7% of the total anophelines collected. The mean biting rate for
An. marajoara was 1.27 (SD ± 0.81); it was 0.74 (SD ± 0.91) for
An. darlingand 0.11 (SD ± 0.10) for
Anopheles neomaculipalpus
Curry and the overall biting rate was 2.29 (SD ± 1.06). A total of 5,886 mosquitoes collected by all three methods were assayed by ELISA and 28 pools, equivalent to 28 mosquitoes, yielded positive results for
Plasmodium
spp. CS protein.
An. neomaculipalpus had the highest sporozoite rate 0.84% (3/356), followed by
An. darlingi 0.82% (16/1,948) and
An. marajoara 0.27% (9/3,332). The overall sporozoite rate was 0.48% (28/5,886). The rates of infection by
Plasmodium
species in mosquitoes were 0.37% (22/5,886) for
Plasmodium vivax
(Grassi & Feletti) and 0.10% (6/5,886) for
Plasmodium falciparum
(Welch). The estimated overall EIR for
An. darling was 2.21 infective bites/person/year, 1.25 for
An. marajoara and 0.34 for
An. neomaculipalpus. The overall EIR was four infective bites/person/year. The biting rate, the sporozoite rate and the EIR are too low to be indicators of the efficacy of control campaigns in this area.
