Mosquitoes are a common summer-time inconvenience, leaving behind welts and itchiness of the skin.
More concerning, however, is their capacity to spread severe disease. For millions upon millions of years, these insects have developed the ability to silently and efficiently feed on human blood without notice. This ability is being taken advantage of to maximize their ability to carry and spread disease. In many instances, while feeding on the blood of an infected animal or human, mosquitoes ingest infectious parasites, viruses, and bacteria. Now infectious, the insect goes on to infect other hosts that it bites and/or feeds on.
With vector-borne diseases contributing to almost 20% of all infectious diseases and over 700,000 deaths annually (from diseases like malaria, dengue, and yellow fever), it should come as no surprise that the American Center for Disease Control deems mosquitoes to be the most deadly animal in the world.
Often, disease burden is concentrated in tropical regions of the world, with developing nations being most disproportionately impacted. In the past decade, significant outbreaks of malaria, dengue, and Zika have ravaged communities and health-care capacity.
However, vector-borne diseases are now being found beyond the tropics. As global temperatures continue to rise, transmission is expected to rise in the tropics and emerge in more temperate regions of the world. In fact, the Aedes mosquito vector has already been demonstrated to be responsible for the recent emergence and outbreaks of Chikungunya Virus in over 100 countries, and Mayaro Virus is tipped to be the next arbovirus to cause an epidemic.
As well, the rise in global trade and travel, rapid urbanization, and the equally rapid rate of adaptation of mosquitoes to new environments are all poised to drive the spread of vector-borne diseases to latitudes and altitudes never seen before.
Now more than ever, pandemic preparedness is imperative. Gone are the days where traveling abroad is the only way in which one could contract infection by malaria. Strategies must be developed to help control vectors, public education must be prioritized so that communities are aware and may develop strategies to protect themselves, and vaccine development efforts must be ramped up – perhaps prioritizing the development of multi-valent pan-family vaccines that have the capacity to protect against numerous vector-borne diseases through a single dose.
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