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© cc photo: Andy Langager
Evolution has another surprise in store. Viruses must constantly infect to survive. But yes, how do you do that if, for example, the victim becomes ill and goes into quarantine? Some viruses have developed a method that can also break through that isolation. They alter the odor of the body they have infected in such a way that it becomes a bait for mosquitoes. They come to it, suck the blood and then transfer the virus to the next victim. A kind of biological flash deliverers.
You might not think it, but mosquitoes are the most deadly animals in the world for humans. They transmit diseases like malaria, Zika, yellow fever and a whole host of others. How can they strike so massively? Immunologist Penghua Wang of the University of Connecticut describes how mice infected with malaria acquire a different body odor that makes them more attractive to malaria mosquitoes, the main carrier of the disease.
The researchers placed infected and uninfected mice separately in glass tubes and then released mosquitoes on them. The mice infected with Zika and dengue were significantly more popular with the mosquitoes. They then managed to find out which of the odorants had the most effect on the mosquitoes. It concerns acetophenone, a substance that is also used in perfumes. Infected mice produce ten times as much of this as healthy mice. They then discovered that people who are infected with the disease also produce more of this substance. If one hand was smeared with the fragrance of an infected person and another with that of a healthy person, the first hand attracted many more mosquitoes.
Pang notes that vitamin A is a good means of counteracting the change in body odor and that this vitamin is a chronic deficiency in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, areas that suffer from many cases of malaria, among other things. .