The mosquito is the deadliest insect in the world. More than one million deaths a year are attributed to mosquito-borne diseases, including malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, Zika and chikungunya fever.
The way mosquitoes looking for and feeding on their hosts are important factors in how a virus circulates in nature. Mosquitoes spread diseases, acting as carriers of viruses and other pathogens.
For immunologists and researchers in infectious diseases, a better understanding of how a virus interacts with a host can provide new strategies for preventing and treating mosquito-borne diseases.
What makes you more “attractive” to mosquitoes
a study recently published, scientists have discovered that some viruses can change a person’s body odor to make it more “attractive” to insects, leading to more bites that allow the virus to spread. These viruses change the odors of the host to attract mosquitoes.
mosquitoes locate a potential host through various sensory cues, such as body temperature and carbon dioxide emitted by your breath. Smells also play a role. Previous laboratory research has found that malaria-infected mice have odor changes that make them more attractive to deadly insects.
Given this, the researchers wondered if other viruses were transmitted by mosquitosuch as dengue and Zika, can also change a person’s smell to make them more attractive to mosquitoes and if there is a way to prevent these changes.
To investigate this, they placed mice infected with dengue or Zika virus, uninfected mice and mosquitoes in one of the three arms of a glass chamber. When they applied airflow through the mice’s chambers to channel their odors to the mosquitoes, they found that several mosquitoes chose to fly to the infected mice.
To identify the odor, the researchers isolated 20 different gaseous chemicals from the odor emitted by infected mice. Of these, they found three that stimulate a significant response in mosquito antennae. When they applied these three compounds to the skin of healthy mice and human volunteers, only one, acetophenone, attracted more mosquitoes. They found that infected mice produced ten times more acetophenone than uninfected mice.
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