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Mosquitoes and AIDS
Name: ranger
Status: N/A
Age: N/A
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: Around 1993
Question:
Since we know that when a mosquito puts the bite on someone or
something, it injects some anticoagulant fluid to keep the blood flowing, why,
then, could not a mosquito pass the Aids virus on to someone else after it had
gotten some infected persons blood?
Replies:
Your reasoning is logical. There are two problems though, the
more practical is that it would be hard to test, no one has shown that it is
possible to transmit the HIV virus (which is thought to cause AIDS) via a
mosquito vector or that someone's HIV infection is from a mosquito bite. The
other problem is that the HIV virus is a very fragile virus. No one serious
ly believes that an HIV virus could be taken up by one mosquito and stay alive
long enough in that mosquito to infect someone else.
psych
Just to add fuel to the fire. A recent report from the BBC on
AIDS infected tribes in Africa indicated that some of the infected groups
were, indeed, isolated and did not interact with other tribes, but still got
the virus. The health investigators asked how this could happen, the doctors
said they did not know but they suspected the mosquito. They said to date
they had not found one carrying the virus but they were continuing their
search.
thomasb
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Update: June 2012
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