WIKIMEDIA, WILDTURKEYBeing bitten by a mosquito is an annoyance, but that’s not the worst part: a recent mouse study suggests the swelling and inflammation caused by the bite may boost viruses’ ability to replicate and cause disease. Researchers at the University of Leeds in England infected mice with Zika, dengue, and chikungunya, either by injection or via bites from the Aedes aegypti mosquito, and found that the latter produced order-of-magnitude higher amounts of virus, suggesting the bite itself may enhance the severity of infection, the team reported Tuesday (June 21) in Immunity.
“Mosquito bites are not just annoying—they are key for how these viruses spread around your body and cause disease,” study coauthor Clive McKimmie, a research fellow at Leeds, said in a statement. “We think the bite itself is affecting the systemic course and clinical outcome of the infection.”
When a mosquito bites someone, its saliva elicits an immune response involving white blood cells—neutrophils and other myeloid cells. When McKimmie and colleagues infected the mice with virus via a mosquito bite, they found that the virus infects some of these white blood cells become infected with the virus and starts replicating. By contrast, when the researchers infected the animals with virus by direct injection, the virus failed to replicate well.
The findings have yet to be ...
