In the skin of summer. What you need to know about mosquitoes

A hell of a buzz. The mosquito, in summer, is the one that spoils the holidays of the rich and kills the poor, as Florence Foresti so aptly puts it in one of her sketches. But we should rather talk about mosquitoes, since its family contains 3,700 species! The best known are the Culex pipienswith Gallic roots, vector of the Nile virus patient, theAnophelesvector of malaria, theAedes aegyptiand finally theAedes albopictusthe famous tiger mosquito born in Asia, but which is in the process of colonizing the whole world, including France thanks to its famous ecological and physiological plasticity.

>> Visualize how the tiger mosquito has colonized France over the past ten years

This sucking biting insect landed clandestinely in 2004 in France via Italy, in Menton, with its black and white stripes, hidden in the tires of cars and trucks. It is capable of spreading dengue fever, Chikungunya and Zika, among other things: according to the health security agency, in its tiger form, it will colonize the entire metropolis within 5 to 6 years. An inexorable advance that worries the whole world in the absence of a means of combating transmitted viral diseases.

Genetically modified mosquitoes

Because the mosquito represents above all a growing health threat: the infectious agents they transmit claim 800,000 victims each year. In France, in 2022, 65 cases of autochthonous dengue fever were recorded, i.e. the largest dengue epidemic recorded in metropolitan France.

Faced with these increasingly explosive epidemics, according to the World Health Organization, researchers are working on new techniques: by irradiating industrially produced males to sterilize them for example, but also via genetic engineering techniques such as gene drive. Male mosquitoes genetically modified to kill their female counterparts. All this despite the alerts of many scientists who wonder what mosquito bit these sorcerer’s apprentices.