Mosquitoes May Infect You With More Than One Disease In A Single Bite

As if disease-carrying mosquitoes weren’t bad enough in the first place, scientists have found the pesky insects may be able to infect us with two viruses at the same time.  A small lab study that exposed mosquitoes to blood infected with varying combinations of dengue, Zika and chikungunya proved that the mosquitoes were able to pick up two viruses — Zika and chikungunya — at the same time. The results suggest that human beings could be infected with both the Zika virus and the chikungunya virus in one bite, but researchers need to conduct more studies to find out how this affects a person’s health and immunities to future disease. The research follows a previous experiment that found mosquitoes can also carry dengue and chikungunya at the same time.  “We didn’t know what to expect, and now we know that [Aedes aegypti mosquitoes] are very susceptible to co-infection and can co-transmit at a relatively high frequency,” said lead investigator and Colorado State University researcher Claudia Rückert, who presented the study results at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene on Monday. “This could mean that there are more co-infected patients than we thought.” Scientists in Nicaragua recently estimated that one in five people who tested positive for one of the three viruses also had at least one of the remaining two.  The question of simultaneous infection in b...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news