Electrified pathogens and urbanized mosquitoes

How can mosquitoes be even more fun?

If you’re anything like the gang at LOTME, you’ve spent quite a bit of time wondering which cliché is the best fit for a less-affluent Baltimore neighborhood.

^{DamrongpanThongwat/thinkstock}

The answer? When it rains, it pours.

We’ll explain. By definition, a less-affluent neighborhood is, well, less affluent, and that lack of affluence has many health consequences for the people who live in those neighborhoods. Today we’re focusing on everyone’s favorite winged disease vector, the mosquito.

It was already known that low-income urban neighborhoods have more mosquitoes than other neighborhoods, and now the Journal of Medical Entomology has published a survey of 13 residential blocks in Baltimore that shows low-income neighborhoods have larger mosquitoes as well.

Trapping took place in five socioeconomically diverse Baltimore neighborhoods during June and July of 2015-2017. (In case you were wondering, the researchers used BG-Sentinel traps baited with CO₂ and a 2.0-mL Octenol Lure, which would have been our choice, too). It confirmed that lower affluence correlated with larger mosquito wing size. Wing size, the investigators said in a written statement, “is an accurate proxy for body size in mosquitoes, and body size influences traits that are important to disease transmission.”

So, it seems that larger mosquitoes are more efficient at transmitting diseases, which means more dengue fever, more Zika, more chikungunya, more eastern equine encephalitis, and more West Nile virus. To extend the original cliché a bit, when it rains in Baltimore, the poor neighborhoods get the wettest.

* Correction, 10/24/19: An earlier version of this story misstated the fungal target of the electrical therapy experiment.

^{Jonny Hawkins}