Some Viruses Make You Smell Tastier to Mosquitoes
hubie writes:
A sneaky way of increasing a virus's odds of transmission:
Zika and dengue fever viruses alter the scent of mice and humans they infect, researchers report in the June 30 issue of Cell. The altered scent attracts mosquitoes, which bite the host, drink their infected blood, and then carry the virus to its next victim.
[...] These viruses require ongoing infections in animal hosts as well as mosquitoes in order to spread. If either of these are missing-if all the susceptible hosts clear the virus, or all the mosquitoes die-the virus disappears. For example, during the yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia in 1793, the coming of the fall frosts killed the local mosquitoes, and the outbreak ended.
In tropical climates without killing frosts, there are always mosquitoes; the virus just needs one to bite an infected host animal in order to spread. Zika and dengue viruses seem to have developed a sneaky way of increasing the odds.
[...] "The virus can manipulate the hosts' skin microbiome to attract more mosquitoes to spread faster!" says Penghua Wang, an immunologist at UConn Health and one of the study authors. The findings could explain how mosquito viruses manage to persist for such a long time.
Wang and his coauthors also tested a potential preventative. They gave mice with dengue fever a type of vitamin A derivatives, isotretinoin, known to increase the production of the skin's antimicrobial peptide. The isotretinoin-treated mice gave off less acetophenone, reducing their attractiveness to mosquitoes and potentially reducing the risk of infecting others with the virus.
Wang says the next step is to analyze more human patients with dengue and Zika to see if the skin odor-microbiome connection is generally true in real world conditions, and to see if isotretinoin reduces acetophenone production in sick humans as well as it does in sick mice.
Journal Reference:
HongZhang, YibinZhu, ZiwenLiu, et al., A volatile from the skin microbiota of flavivirus-infected hosts promotes mosquito attractiveness, Cell, 2022. DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2022.05.016
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.