'Lazy
mosquitoes' mean more women than men get chikungunya:
scientists
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[November 08, 2016]
By Magdalena Mis
LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - "Lazy
mosquitoes" are the reason why women, who tend to spend more time at
home than men, are more likely to be infected by chikungunya, a painful
mosquito-borne viral disease which spreads the same way as Zika,
researchers said on Monday.
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Chikungunya, which is commonly transmitted by the daytime-biting
aedes aegypti mosquito, can cause debilitating symptoms including
fever, headache and severe joint pain lasting months.
A new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, analyzed a 2012 outbreak of chikungunya in the Bangladeshi
village of Palpara, around 100 km (60 miles) from the capital Dhaka.
The study said more than a quarter of cases were spread within the
same household, while half of infections occurred in households less
than 200 meters away, creating small clusters of the disease.
Because infected mosquitoes did not like to travel far, Bangladeshi
women, who spend two thirds of the day at home, were 1.5 times more
likely to develop chikungunya than men who spend less than half
their time at home during the day.
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"It appears that mosquitoes are very lazy," Henrik Salje, the
research leader from Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of
Public Health, said in a statement.
"They bite someone in a household and get infected with a virus and
then hang around to bite someone else in the same home or very
nearby. The extra time women spend in and around their home means
they are at increased risk of getting sick."
The disease occurs in Africa and Asia, but cases have also been
reported in Europe and the Americas.
The study said while there was no vaccine and little treatment
available for diseases such as chikungunya, Zika, dengue and yellow
fever, which are all transmitted by the aedes aegypti, knowing where
outbreaks were likely to be clustered could help in slowing them.
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"We don't yet have a very good toolbox for fighting these diseases,"
Salje said.
"But once we do, this research tells us how we could trigger a
response and tailor our interventions - particularly in rural
communities - to those at the greatest risk, and those people are
the ones who spend the most time in and around their homes."
The researchers said that coils designed to repel mosquitoes did not
help stop chikungunya transmission in the Palpara region.
(Reporting by Magdalena Mis, editing by Emma Batha. Please credit
Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters,
that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, corruption and
climate change. Visit news.trust.org)
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