Dr. Daniel Markowski, a technical adviser for the American Mosquito Control Association, says “no” to that question.
He informed MNT that there was “no indication that mosquitoes can acquire and spread the SARS-CoV-2 virus.”
Dr. Markowski noted that it is crucial to comprehend how mosquitoes transfer virions, or viral particles, in order to comprehend the processes that stop them from harboring and disseminating the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
According to him, a mosquito usually has to feed on an infected host first since their blood usually contains enough virus in the small amount that is collected during a mosquito’s blood meal.
The insect’s midgut, which includes a variety of immune responses like to our own, is the second place where the virus must survive. They must also proliferate, connect to receptor sites on the midgut wall, and eventually pass through that barrier into the mosquito’s body cavity, said Dr. Markowski. They must also survive inside the mosquito’s midgut and replicate there.
Dr. Markowski stated that once within the bodily cavity, the virus needs to pass past the mosquito’s immune system and enter the insect’s salivary glands while continuing to multiply.
Now that the mosquito is feeding, they can be transferred to a new host with the following blood meal. As you can see, each virus travels a pretty long and complicated route when it spreads from a mosquito bite from one host to another. Since few viruses have successfully made that voyage over millennia, numerous viruses like the flu, coronavirus, and monkeypox are not transmitted by mosquitoes.
A team of researchers led by Dr. Stephen Higgs, associate vice president for research and director of the Biosecurity Research Institute at Kansas State University, published a study in July 2022 that revealed the SARS-CoV-2 virus did not replicate in mosquitoes even when conditions were extremely harsh.
The researchers concluded that even if a mosquito fed on a person who was infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the mosquito would not be able to spread the infection to humans.
Because coronaviruses simply do not infect mosquitoes or other arthropods, Dr. Higgs explained, “we honestly did not expect that it would infect mosquitoes.”
“In our initial paper, we implanted SARS-CoV-2 into mosquitoes. We are aware that adopting this method occasionally results in the transmission of a virus that would not typically infect a resistant mosquito. SARS-COV-2 did not infect and multiply in the mosquitoes even with that abnormal technique, he remarked
Can COVID-19 make people more susceptible to infections spread by mosquitoes?
Researchers from the University of Connecticut discovered in June 2022 that several viruses, including dengue and zika, can change the smell of a person’s skin.
This makes them more alluring to mosquitoes, enticing the bugs to bite them, contract the virus, and maybe infect others.
Could the SARS-CoV-2 virus cause this to occur? And even if mosquitoes are immune to viral infection, may having COVID-19 make a person more vulnerable to contracting a mosquito-borne illness like Zika?
According to Dr. Penghua Wang, an assistant professor in the Department of Immunology at the University of Connecticut and a member of the research team, “several investigations have revealed that COVID-19 patients emit a particular blend of chemicals.”
“Some of these substances might serve as mosquito repellents, while others might serve as attractants. The possibility that COVID-19 patients will encourage more insects to spread other mosquito-borne diseases cannot be ruled out. To the best of my knowledge, there isn’t a formal study that proves COVID-19 attracts mosquitoes, despite what a few readers of the news about my essay have told me.
– Penghua Wang, Dr.
Added the doctor, “That seems really implausible to me.
“The reason for this is that those mosquito-transmitted viruses have evolved strategies through this evolutionary process and have evolved alongside mosquitoes and humans, such as changing the bacterial fauna of infected hosts. He told us that it would be highly unlikely for SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses that are not transmitted by mosquitoes to have acquired these advantages through evolution.
