  West Nile virus (WNV) is prevalent in the United States but it shows
considerable divergence in transmission patterns and spatio-temporal
intensity.It is to be noted that the mechanism that drives the transmission
potential of WNV is described by the abilities of host species to maintain and
disseminate the pathogens pertinent with different eco-epidemiological factors
that have an influence on the contact rates amongst the interacting
species.There is growing evidence that several vectors exhibit strong feeding
preferences towards different host communities.We construct a process based
weather driven ordinary differential equation (ODE) model to understand the
impact of one vector species Culex pipiens, preferred avian and non-preferred
human hosts and compared it surveillance data for the Culex pipiens complex
collected in Cook County, Illinois, USA.In our mechanistic model, we also
demonstrate that adulticide treatments produced significant reductions in the
Culex pipiens population.We take into account the feeding index that can be
described as the ratio between observed frequency of mosquitoes feeding on one
host compared to another host, divided by the expected frequency of mosquitoes
feeding on these two hosts based on the presence of the particular hosts to
develop this transmission model for WNV. Our findings demonstrate that the
interplay between the feeding index and mosquito abatement strategy is rather a
complex phenomenon and it induces a heterogeneous contact rates that should be
included while modelling multi-host, multi-vector transmission model.
