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NEW YORK, NY – Mosquito bites are irritating, red and irritating. But mosquitoes also spread deadly diseases. A researcher has found a way to make mosquitoes believe that they are full, so they will not bite you.
"If there is one, he'll find me," said Daren Holloman while walking in Piedmont Park. He told Channel 2 when a mosquito poked him: "I'm puffing up. It's like an injury to me. He swells in a welt. "
Mosquitoes spread deadly diseases, including West Nile, Dengue and Malaria. Only female mosquitoes bite and can bite many people by spreading diseases along the way before using the proteins present in our blood for egg production.
"She consumed the equivalent of 275 cheeseburgers, so, as you can imagine, we would definitely be in a coma of food after that," said Laura Duvall, a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University in New York. York.
Canal 2 went to the laboratory where Duvall conducts research on Aedes aegypti mosquitoes.
She breeds mosquito eggs in larvae, pupae and finally adult mosquitoes in a small, hot and humid room.
"How many mosquitoes do you think there is here?" Channel 2's Dave Huddleston questioned Duvall about the mosquito container that she owned. "There are thousands of mosquitoes there," said Duvall.
She wanted to understand why the attraction of mosquitoes to people went out after biting you and eating a big meal of blood. Duvall said that a food coma is a good metaphor.
"They use paths similar to the ones you or I would have known after Thanksgiving dinner," said Duvall.
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Duvall identified the part that suppresses the attractiveness of female mosquitoes to people and discovered that diet drugs could activate it. She showed Canal 2 a video of a mosquito drinking sheep blood and diet drugs from an artificial feeder.
"So the idea is that if we find a way to activate this path, we can fool a hungry mosquito into acting as if it had already been eating blood and losing interest in biting people," Duvall said.
She said for the moment that the drugs are exhausting after about three days. But researchers are trying to make drugs last longer and cheaper so mosquitoes bite fewer people.
"But we are actually affecting their ability to carry diseases. So it's something we can also apply to other mosquito species and maybe even other blood donors like ticks, "said Duvall.
Mosquitoes are an important food source for bats, birds, frogs, turtles and fish.
"If we stop them from laying eggs, will there be enough larvae to fish?" Asked Huddleston at Duvall.
"So, it's a possibility, I think it's drugs that will not have a complete deletion variability for egg laying, so I do not think we're going to totally collapse the population," he said. Duvall.
She thinks that in ten years, you may be able to use these medications so that mosquitoes stop biting your family.
"They should definitely try here and in other public places where there is water," Chilon Martin said while walking to Piedmont Park.
Duvall said the next step was to test the diet drugs to check their effectiveness on other types of mosquitoes. She told us that drugs that prevent mosquitoes from biting people would not kill them.
Duvall said the mosquitoes would continue to drink sugar, which would keep them alive.
© 2019 Cox Media Group.
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