This is not Aedes albopictus. But it is a mosquito. |
It also had a very interesting snippet - that the Mexico Epidemiological Surveillance System (SINAVE) has reported detection of ZIKV in wild caught Aedes albopictus mosquitoes in Mexico.[1] The were identified using real-time RT-PCR and confirmed 1st April 2016.
That's a first for Mexico and also a first for the Americas in terms of detecting the variant of the Asian lineage of ZIKV that has been running rampant across the region, in a presumed vector. To date, all the detection have been from (many) humans, a howler monkey and a marmoset.[1,4,]
The 1966 Malaysian Ae.aegypti ZIKV isolate is HQ234499 at the top of the Asian lineage branch |
Detection in midgut only indicates ingestion whereas finding virus in the legs for example, indicates disseminated infection of the mozzies (ingested, infected, whole body spread). Whole squashed mozzies alone = more work needed. Nonetheless - this is a very valuable finding and its great to see someone is pursuing this and succeeding. And talking about it.
Up until this point we'd been assuming mosquitoes were the major transmitter because they had been in the past - as far as we knew. Now we have a little hard data.
References...
- http://www.paho.org/hq/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=11599&Itemid=41691&lang=en
- ISOLATION OF ZIKA VIRUS FROM AEDES AEGYPTI MOSQUITOES IN MALAYSIA
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4976739 - Genetic Characterization of Zika Virus Strains: Geographic Expansion of the Asian Lineage
http://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd.0001477 - http://www.paho.org/hq/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_view&Itemid=270&gid=34183&lang=en
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