The simple model of mosquito-borne illness: A mosquito eats a blood meal from an infected person, then passes on the disease when it bites someone else.
But the simple model omits a key piece in some disease stories. The bug causing the illness has to incubate inside the mosquito for a while — about two weeks in the case of dengue — before the mosquito infect other people. Some researchers want to take advantage of that wrinkle by shortening the (already pretty short) lifespan of wild mosquitoes, which could reduce the percentage of their lives when they’re liable to spread disease.
In a study published this week in the journal Science, a group of Australian researchers took Wolbachia, a type of bacteria that naturally infects many insects, and cultivated it to infect the kind of mosquitoes that spread dengue. They found that the bug significantly shortened mosquitoes’ lifespan, from somewhere around two months to somewhere around a month, give or take.
Fighting Dengue Fever by Making Mosquitoes Die Young
Posted by alex 608 days ago (http://blogs.wsj.com)Who Voted for this Story
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