Mosquitoes live in most regions of the world. They are born into water, and it does not have to be much, where they spend about two weeks developing through the stages of egg, larva and pupa. As an adult, they live for up to another eight weeks.
The mouth parts of mosquitoes have evolved to be specialized in piercing ‘skin’ and drawing out juices. Males use this talent for removing juices from plants, yet females need a blood meal to be able to lay eggs and of the 3,500 species of mosquito globally, some species feed on humans.
This characteristic means that the female mosquito of some species can be the carrier of a number of infectious diseases. These diseases affect and kill millions of individuals each year. Two of these diseases are malaria and dengue fever
Malaria is caused by a mosquito infected with eukaryotic protists of the genus Plasmodium biting humans (and one sortnd of monkey). The disease is common throughout Africa, the Americas and Asia but it was eradicated from Australia in 1981. Europe used to be infected too but is now mostly clean of malaria, although not of mosquitoes.
The disease is caused by the duplication of the malarial parasites in the red blood cells which creates indications similar to headaches and fever – something like a severe case of the flu. In acute cases, this can lead to coma and death.
Prevention is much better than cure, so the first thing to do is endeavor to prevent mosquitoes breeding by eradicating undue amounts of water no matter how small and how brackish. Secondly, endeavor to prevent them biting you by using mosquito repellent and mosquito nets treated with pesticide.
There is no long-lasting vaccine that will prevent you developing malaria, although there are drugs available to stop travellers getting malaria in the short time. Most types of malaria can be cured effectively, although there is evidence of resistance to several of the anti-malarial drugs.
Dengue Fever is also carried by particular mosquitoes. The symptoms of dengue vary but they almost always include a headache and a skin rash and sometimes joint pain. The disease is not usually fatal, yet it can be so when it develops into dengue haemorrhagic fever or dengue shock syndrome (where blood pressure drops very low causing organs to malfunction).
There are four sorts of dengue fever. Having had the one, the patient has lifelong immunity to that strain, yet merely temporary immunity from the other three. As with malaria there is no vaccine against dengue. The only attack is to reduce the number of mosquitoes and the number of bites.
Whereas the incidence of infection with malaria is falling, the incidence of infection by dengue is rising. Dengue is now endemic in more than 110 countries. It normally takes 4-7 days for the disease to present itself after infection, so any flu-like symptoms showing within a week of returning from an region known to have dengue should be treated gravely, especially as many GP’s in the west may overlook the real source of the problem.
Owen Jones, the author of this piece writes on several subjects, but is at present involved with work on mosquito bite treatment problems. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Mosquito Bite Swellings.
