mosquito

Last week, Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft executive, presented a fascinating new invention to the world during a talk at the TED conference. The TED talks are renowned for providing a stage for great people with great ideas... 
 
 
 

On 18 January I flew from Amsterdam to Copenhagen for a 3-day workshop on malaria and architecture. The KLM Fokker 100 took off in time at 07.05 am, and nothing eventful happened until the time I opened the in-flight magazine Holland Herald…
 
 

The James Gang at UC Irvine has made a useful contribution to the question of whether or not transgenic mosquitoes are fit.

This week (1-5 Feb, 2010), scientists are meeting at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, Austria to present recent developments and plan future research in male mosquito biology.

Those who colonize mosquitoes are rightfully protective of them. Some species require a large amount of work to establish in the laboratory, and many of you have given your blood, sweat, holidays, and earnest attention to ensuring they exist. When you distribute it, you are giving a gift.

I know this web site is MALARIA World. But the field of genetic control of vectors is so small that I hope you will indulge me in a blog that reaches into arbovirology and highlights the kind of technology we might anticipate against Plasmodia in Anopheles. Genetic control of vectors received another Christmas gift when a bonus remarkable phenotype due to Wolbachia infection - in addition to cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI) and life shortening - was reported in Cell.

Targets for vector control have usually exploited serendipitous findings such as ion channels and hormonal control of development. However, the modern trend to search for specific targets for intervention is bearing fruit. Rogers et al.

'Mug: De fascinerende wereld van volksvijand nummer I' went on sale in Dutch bookstores last Friday. The book (in Dutch) was written for the general public, to become familiarised with the difficulties of controlling diseases like malaria in developing countries. Given the absence of malaria in the Netherlands since 1959, the Dutch population has now lived for five decades without the threat of a mosquito-borne disease. There is therefore remarkably little general knowledge about mosquito-borne diseases, notably malaria.