Current distribution of arthropod of public health relevance in Italy: results from systematic reviews.

INTRODUCTION Within the INF-ACT project task 2.3.1. PE13 – RESEARCH NODE2 (Gathering of data on vector presence/abundance/resistance to insecticide in Italy from scientific and grey literature) three different working groups (one for each arthropod group) were selected for mosquitoes (M), sand flies (S) and ticks (T). The aim of the work is to systematically review the existing published literature of the last 22 years related to the occurrence (geographic presence and distribution) of mosquito, sand fly and tick species in Italy. MATERIALS AND METHODS For the screening of publications, we considered all studies published in peer-reviewed journals obtained from the literature search on major databases (Scopus, CABA, EMBASE, WoS, MEDLINE). The selection for relevance and eligibility of these studies (title and abstract) has been carried out by working groups that included volunteers (M: 28, S: 18, T: 24), gathered in pairs and working independently, solving the potential disagreements on study eligibility, if necessary, with the examination of the studies by a third reviewer. Only publications with Italian or English full text were considered for the first screening of relevance, therefore publications without available full text in these two languages were excluded. In order to avoid double counting of the studies published more than once, the papers were compared juxtaposing author names, geographic area of the studies, the sample sizes and the outcomes. RESULTS & CONCLUSIONS The results of the first phase are shown below sorted by systematic group. The volunteers received in total 6,909 (M), 1,981 (S), 12,018 (T) selected records, and extracted by all five used databases. 751 (M), 440 (S), 1,494 (T) of them resulted accepted, 515 (M), 597 (S) doubtful and 5,643 (M), 944 (S), 10,524 (T) rejected. It should be noted that for ticks group no doubtful papers are present because of the already screened abstracts. In conclusion, hitherto 12.8% of the papers screened from the literature were found to be suitable for the eligibility criteria and will be subjected to full-text screening). Aim of the next working step will be the creation of a unique database shared among involved groups (mosquitoes, sand flies and ticks) and, after full-text retrieval, reviewers will extract data from text, tables, or figures and will gather them into pre-defined tabular forms. As previously explained extracted data, will pass a double crosschecking procedure, operated by two reviewers independently. An additional comparison of all extracted data will be scheduled with the original selected studies. Full-text examination is still ongoing and as soon as data collection phase will be completed thematic systematic review manuscript will be produced.