Okay. Have we really found a way to trick mosquitoes in to not knowing we are in the area? Instead of bug sprays and nets, there have been chemicals discovered that really do in fact fool mosquito’s ability to even know we are there in the same vicinity. This could mean a breakthrough in everything from malaria and West Nile virus defense to your basic camping adventure.
Anandasankar Ray, an assistant professor of entomology at the University of California at Riverside explains:
“These chemicals offer powerful advantages as potential tools for reducing mosquito-human contact and can lead to the development of new generations of insect repellents and lures.”
The chemicals consist of odor molecules that disrupt carbon dioxide sensors that alert mosquitoes to exhaled human breath. The odor molecules identified disrupt receptor cells for carbon dioxide located in small, antennae like appendages close to the mosquito’s mouth. These receptors are activated by the smell of carbon dioxide, triggering a signal in the brain that prods the mosquito to fly upwind, following the smell of CO2 until they reach its source where they bite, infect and cause harm.
What kind of chemicals are these in fact?
First are a class of inhibitors, or odor molecules, like hexanol and butanal, that inhibit the carbon dioxide receptor in mosquitoes and flies. Hexanol may refer to any of the following 17 isomeric organic compounds with the formula C6H13OH. Butanal is the aldehyde derivative of butane commonly found in many lighters. It is a colorless flammable liquid with an acrid smell. It is miscible with most organic solvents.
Then there are the fakers, or imitators like 2-butanone, that mimic carbon dioxide and could be used as lures for traps to attract mosquitoes away from humans.
Finally there are blinders that cause ultra-prolonged activation of the carbon dioxide sensing neurons, effectively “blinding” the mosquitoes and disabling their carbon dioxide detection machinery for several minutes.
Ray continues:
“These chemicals offer powerful advantages as potential tools for reducing mosquito-human contact, and can lead to the development of new generations of insect repellents and lures. The identification of such odor molecules – which can work even at low concentrations, and are therefore economical – could be enormously effective in compromising the ability of mosquitoes to seek humans, thus helping control the spread of mosquito-borne diseases.”
Malaria took the lives of some 781,000 lives in 2009, according to data from the United Nations’ World Health Organization. Some 90% of malaria deaths each year occur in Africa, 92% of which are children under the age of five.
Other mosquito-borne diseases include dengue, yellow fever and West Nile virus.
The identification of West Nile virus (WNV) in the suburbs of New York City in the summer of 1999 marked the first detection of the mosquito-borne virus in the western hemisphere. During the following years the virus extended its range throughout most of the eastern parts of the North American continent, and then spread to the southern and western parts of the USA and to parts of Mexico.
It is feared that expansion of the virus range in the direction of Central and South America is presently going to occur. WNV, a member of the Japanese encephalitis virus complex in the family Flaviviridae, is now one of the most widely distributed flaviviruses worldwide. Its geographic range includes Africa, North America, West Asia, Australia, Europe and the Middle East, where both sporadic cases and major outbreaks of encephalitis with fatalities have been reported.
This new chemical breakthrough may help squelch the spread of dead viruses and even simply improve your summer camping experiences.
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Written by Sy Kraft