Are Mosquitoes 'developing resistance to bed nets'?

Bed nets treated with insecticide have been one of the cheapest & most effective methods of combating the spread of Malaria, especially in Africa. When properly deployed they can cut malaria rates by half. Now a team of researchers from Senegal have suggested that mosquitoes may be developing an immunity to the nets and their use has reduced the immunity of children and adults to malaria infection. The researchers argue that the effectiveness of the bed nets reduced the immunity that people acquire through exposure to mosquito bites, while the proportion of the insects with a resistance to one type of pesticide had risen from 8% to 48%. As a result there was a rapid rebound in infection rates. Other researchers suggest that the study was too small to draw any such conclusions as it only looked at one small village.

Read More at BBC News

Posted by Astrojenny

For all your mosquito pest problems visit our web store, www.capy.co.uk

Read More

Mosquito Versus Raindrop

Mosquitoes seem to thrive in humid places where heavy rainfall is common. Can mosquitoes fly in the rain and if so, how? A raindrop may be similar in size but weighs 50 times more than a mosquito. David Hu, a mechanical engineer at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta used high speed cameras and a specially constructed "rain box" to film the insects in flight. The mosquitoes showed no sign of trying to avoid the raindrops. They received both glancing blows and direct hits from drops, which momentarily knocked the insects off course before they re-stabilized and continued on their way.

Read More and Watch Video at io9

Posted by Astrojenny

For all your mosquito pest problems visit our web store, www.capy.co.uk

Read More

Mosquitoes Home In On CO2 & Body Odour

Researchers released female yellow fever mosquitoes into a wind tunnel and filmed their flight paths. They discovered that the carbon dioxide we exhale is what first alerts mosquitoes to our presence. They then follow the plume of odour from our skin to home in, land on us and feed. This new research could be used to develop better traps for intercepting and capturing mosquitoes that spread diseases such as malaria, dengue and yellow fever.

Read More at Science Daily

Posted by Astrojenny

For all your mosquito pest problems visit our web store, www.capy.co.uk

Read More

Why Are Mosquitoes Disappearing In Parts Of Africa?

Scientists are unclear if the disappearance of malaria carrying mosquitoes in parts of Africa is due to eradication methods or if they will return. Malaria infection rates are falling dramatically in Tanzania, Eritrea, Rwanda, Kenya and Zambia due to effective control programmes. However a team of Danish and Tanzanian scientists  have been collecting and counting the number of mosquitoes caught in thousands of traps in Tanzania for 10 years. They caught over 5,000 insects in 2004. By  2009 the numbers had had dropped to just 14, & this in an area where bed nets & other controls were not being used. It is not clear if the decline is due to chaotic rainfall in recent years, due to climate change, disturbing the mosquitoes natural development cycle or if the mosquitoes are succumbing to disease. The worry is that if the mosquitoes return there will higher levels of disease & mortality amongst children who have not been exposed to malaria during the last 5 or 6 years.

Read More at BBC News

For all your pest control needs, including mosquito control, visit Capybara Pest Control Supplies. 

Read More

Dengue Blocking Mosquitoes Released

The Dengue virus is spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito and affects millions of people In areas like Indonesia, South and Central America, Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and  Australia. Now a team of scientists from Australia are using another parasite,  a bacterium called Wolbachia to fight the spread of the disease. Wolbachia infects many species of insects & is transmitted in the eggs of infected females.  It takes several weeks for the virus to reproduce in the insects’ guts, so  only older mosquitoes can transmit dengue fever.  By using a strain of  Wolbachia  that halves the lifetimes of infected females it is possible to drastically reduce their chance of spreading the disease. The team released almost 300,000 mosquitoes in selected areas of Queensland & then trapped & checked the populations for  Wolbachia. Within only a few months  of the proportion of Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes had risen from nothing to between 80 & 90%. In five months it had infected virtually the whole population & had begun to spread to surrounding neighbourhoods. 

Read More at Not Exactly Rocket Science 

For all your mosquito pest problems visit our web store, www.capy.co.uk

Read More

Watch Mosquitoes Sucking Human Blood In High Definition!

This video is definitely NOT for the faint hearted. If you are even remotely squeamish just move along, there is nothing to see here. If you have the stomach for it though this is quite fascinating. Kudos to the guy who served himself up as a mosquito buffet but be doubly warned, in the end, he gets his revenge!

Watch Video at io9

For all your mosquito pest problems visit our web store, www.capy.co.uk

Read More

Scientists create spermless mosquitoes in an effort to curb malaria.

Scientists create spermless mosquitoes in an effort to curb malaria.

By turning off the gene zpg, essential for normal sperm development, researchers from Imperial College London managed to sterilise the male mosquitoes whilst leaving them still attractive to females & robust enough compete in the vigorous mating that the species take part in. Females mate once in a lifetime & it hoped they can be fooled into mating with a sterile male & lay unfertilized eggs in a bid to reduce the size of mosquito populations.

Read More at Nature

Read More