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Hi. My name's Dr. Perran Ross,
and I'm a research fellow at
the University of
Melbourne in Australia.
Today I'm going to
be talking about
some strategies that
people are using at
the moment to control
mosquitoes and mosquito borne
diseases around the world.
To be able to
control mosquitoes,
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it's really important to
have a good understanding of
the mosquito life cycle and
the places where they
live and spread disease.
Mosquitoes have both an
aquatic and terrestrial stage.
Mosquitoes will lay eggs either
above the water or on the
surface of the water,
and then they can hatch
into the aquatic phase.
Mosquito larvae will
feed on any source of
nutrition that's
in the water until
they have enough food to
complete their development.
Once they reach the pupal stage,
they'll sit there for
a couple of days and
then emerge into
the adult mosquito.
Adult mosquitoes
are terrestrial.
They will fly around and
often they will try to
seek a blood meal
to be able to complete
their life cycle.
At most life stages,
mosquitoes can actually pause
their development
and this is really
an approach they
use to be able to
persist through cold
and dry seasons.
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Mosquitoes are incredibly
widespread around
the world and they are very
important disease vectors.
If you look at all of
the pathogens that mosquitoes
will spread around the world,
they will actually
infect about 700 million
people per year,
and that can cause about
one million deaths.
That is mostly due to malaria,
but there are many
other diseases
which mosquitoes spread,
including things like dengue,
Zika, chikungunya,
and filarial worms.
These pathogens
cause a huge amount
of disease which makes
people very sick,
and there's a huge economic cost
of these diseases as well.
The real problem with
controlling mosquito-borne
diseases is
that many of these diseases do
not have any effective vaccines,
and if they do exist,
they're not very
widely available.
The main way that we control
mosquito-borne diseases is
by controlling
mosquito populations.
This image here shows
the distribution
of the main vector of dengue
fever (Aedes aegypti),
and you can see that
it is widespread
around tropical and
subtropical regions
around the world;
very widespread and there's
a very large number
of people that
are at risk of these diseases.
