Latest Aedes aegypti Stories

Guest edited by Brandeis professor Donald Shepard, it contains 7 original studies co-authored by Brandeis researchersThe ten studies in this special issue document the substantial and growing burden of dengue in the Americas, Africa and Asia, and the burden of a chikungunya outbreak in India.Luiz Tadeu Moraes Figuedo's paper on dengue in Brazil confirms the country's worsening trend; from 1999-2009, where cases rose at 6.2% per year and dengue deaths at 12.0% per year.Carmen Perez and...

Dengue virus circulating between monkeys and mosquitoes could emerge to cause human outbreaksMore than a thousand years ago, somewhere in Southeast Asia, a fateful meeting occurred between a mosquito-borne virus that infected mainly monkeys and a large, susceptible group of humans.The result: the world's first outbreak of dengue fever.Today, dengue virus "” which can produce high fever, excruciating joint pain and even death "” has spread throughout tropical Asia, Africa and South...

In a dramatic breakthrough in the battle against malaria, researchers have identified a low-cost chemical that interferes with a mosquito's ability to detect humans, scientists said on Wednesday.Experts hope the findings could help develop the next generation of mosquito traps and repellents, which could confuse, deter or trap the insects.The chemicals consist of odor molecules that disrupt carbon-dioxide sensors that alert mosquitoes to exhaled human breath, which signals the presence of a...

There is a new player in the fight against dengue fever in Malaysia, 6,000 of them actually. Malaysia released about 6,000 genetically modified mosquitoes into a forest in the first experiment of its kind in Asia aimed at curbing dengue fever, officials said Wednesday to AP.The field test is meant to pave the way for the use of genetically engineered Aedes aegypti male mosquitoes to mate with females and produce no offspring or ones with shorter lives, hopefully curtailing the mosquito...

An official said on Tuesday that Malaysia has delayed a landmark field trial to release genetically modified mosquitoes designed to combat dengue fever. The 4,000 to 6,000 male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes were originally scheduled to be released last month in an attempt to fight dengue, which killed at least 134 people last year in Malaysia alone. The insects have been engineered so that their offspring quickly die, curbing the growth of the population in a technique researchers hope could...

Alexander Raikhel's lab identifies a microRNA molecule that controls blood feeding and egg development in Aedes aegypti femalesEach year, dengue fever infects as many as 100 million people while yellow fever is responsible for about 30,000 deaths worldwide. Both diseases are spread by infected female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which require vertebrate blood to produce eggs. The blood feeding and the egg development are tightly linked to how the mosquito transmits the disease-causing virus.Now...

British scientists have created genetically modified sterile mosquitoes in an experiment to kill off others in their species, and researchers are hopeful that early field trials could help to stave off the rapid spread of dengue fever. This is the first time genetically altered mosquitoes have been set loose in the wild, after years of lab experiments and calculations. But while scientists believe the trial could lead to a breakthrough in halting the disease, critics argue that mutant...

Scientists announced on Thursday that they had successfully sequenced the genome of the Southern house mosquito--the species of insect most responsible for the transmission of diseases such as West Nile virus, encephalitis, and elephantiasis.Writing in two separate papers published by the journal Science, a team of researchers from 39 universities in the United States and Europe reported that they had completely mapped the DNA of the Southern house mosquito, or Culex pipiens...

Dengue fever -- caused by a virus transmitted by mosquitoes -- threatens 2.5 billion people each year and there is no vaccine or treatment. New research by Michigan State University entomologists has found that a bacterium can stop dengue viruses from replicating in the mosquitoes."In nature, about 28 percent of mosquito species harbor Wolbachia bacteria, but the mosquitoes that are the primary transmitters of dengue, Aedes aegypti, have no Wolbachia in them," said Zhiyong Xi, MSU...

The potentially deadly yellow-fever-transmitting Aedes aegypti mosquito detects the specific chemical structure of a compound called octenol as one way to find a mammalian host for a blood meal, Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists report.Scientists have long known that mosquitoes can detect octenol, but this most recent finding by ARS entomologists Joseph Dickens and Jonathan Bohbot explains in greater detail how Ae. aegypti--and possibly other mosquito species--accomplish...