The weather is warming up with more rain. People start to go out to parks and patios more often to enjoy the sun, as do mosquitoes and insects. These mosquitoes lurking in the corners and grasses often play the role of health killers.
Vector-Borne Disease
It is a Disease that results from an infection transmitted to humans and other animals by blood-feeding arthropods, such as mosquitoes, ticks, and fleas. Examples of vector-borne diseases include Dengue fever, West Nile Virus, Lyme disease, and malaria. Although mosquitoes are small, they often harbor deadly threats. According to WHO, more than 80 percent of the global population is at risk of at least one vector-borne disease, and more than half of the population is at risk of two or more vector-borne diseases. In the case of the most notorious mosquitoes, mosquitoes are widely distributed and can transmit many diseases, known as one of the world’s most deadly animals.
WHO data show that hundreds of thousands of people die each year from mosquito-borne diseases worldwide. In 2015, malaria alone claimed 438,000 lives worldwide. For humans, the “vampire” mosquito can not be defended against. There are currently over 3,000 species of mosquitoes around the world, numbering in the tens of billions, including 70 species that transmit disease. The most common brown mosquito in our lives is the Culex mosquito, which is widely distributed around the world and is the culprit of the spread of encephalitis B, lymphatic filariasis, and West Nile fever.
Another more common mosquito is the black and white stripes of Aedes aegypti. From the point of view of infectious diseases Aedes aegypti is indeed very “toxic”, Aedes aegypti, Aedes albopictus are the main vector of dengue fever. In addition to dengue fever, Aedes aegypti can also spread yellow fever, Rift Valley fever, lymphatic filariasis, Zika virus, and so on. Many vector-borne diseases are spread by insects when they bite people, so is it true that blood-related diseases will definitely be spread by mosquitoes? The answer is of course “no”.
The principle of mosquito-borne diseases: like malaria, dengue fever pathogens, enter the mosquito with the blood, will breed in the mosquito’s intestinal tract, and eventually infect the next person through the mosquito bite when spitting out saliva, but not every pathogen can stay in the mosquito’s digestive system.
You can often see questions on the Internet like ” will mosquitoes transmit AIDS “. This concern is not necessary. We know HIV can be transmitted through the blood, and mosquitoes spread the disease not by blood, but by saliva. Normally the main hiding place of HIV is the human immune system in the T-cells, the mosquito intestine and no HIV can be used for the body of the cells. And HIV-contact mosquito intestinal enzymes will be followed by blood digested by mosquitoes to “supplement the body”, there is no opportunity to enter the saliva of mosquitoes to infect people. Recently there are also netizens worried mosquitoes will not spread the coronavirus, as of now there is no research to prove that mosquitoes can spread this respiratory disease. The main method of prevention of pneumonia virus is to wear masks and wash hands regularly.
Mosquitoes are a threat to human health, but the fight against disease is not to eliminate all the simple mosquitoes, but also to consider the impact on the ecosystem. For example, scientists working to combat malaria research organization “Target Malaria” in the study of Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes, collected this mosquito in the predator’s diet in proportion to how much they play a role in plant pollination process. They eventually cautiously concluded that there was no need to exterminate the Anopheles gambiae mosquito, but that by cutting their numbers and breaking the cycle of malaria transmission, malaria eradication would be possible.
But in daily life, when you encounter mosquitoes at home, you should not consider any ecological environment and just kill them. Diseases such as plague, in addition to direct contact with rodents, may also be a bug bite carrying pathogens after the bite of rats, and then bite humans infected, you should also be careful if there are rats in the living environment.
