Can Hiv Be Transmitted Through Blood in Food

Health

If malaria can be transmitted through a mosquito's seize with teeth, why not HIV?

- asks Injy from New York

• December 17, 2007

A mosquito prepares to feast on a human host. [Credit: Matti Parkkonen]

Slap! Some other mosquito! I endeavor to resist the urge to scratch, simply it would be easier to decline a drinking glass of water on a 110-degree twenty-four hour period. I scratch, and oh, glorious relief! The feeling is just momentary, though, considering here comes that hot sensation, and now my skin is swelling into a hideous red bump. Who knows what disease that matter could be carrying? At to the lowest degree I tin exist sure information technology isn't HIV.

Scientists have pretty much ruled out the possibility that mosquitoes can spread the virus that causes AIDS. No documented case of HIV has ever been linked to the hated bloodsucker. While lack of show cannot by itself disprove a hypothesis, the chances of a mosquito transmitting HIV are so slim that the idea has faded out of scientific word equally researchers face up the real challenges of the immense predicament of AIDS.

Withal, when scientists were showtime learning most HIV, the insect manual question was yet another unknown about the new illness. Some experiments and unexplained cases in the 1980s led to finger-pointing at mosquitoes, although scientists already had strong doubts that insects could transmit the illness.

In 1987, the now-defunct U.S. Part of Technology Assessment held a workshop to accost concerns about a possible HIV threat from mosquitoes, bedbugs, ticks and cockroaches. Besides room for "a rare and unusual outcome" of possible insect transmission, the study states that it is almost impossible for the insects to pass along HIV.

The discussion has almost fizzled out, although a few investigations scattered over the years take continued to expect for connections between HIV transmission and insects such equally bedbugs and flies. In 2006, the Usa Army Middle for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine issued a definitive report that outlined why there is no reason to worry about contracting HIV from a mosquito seize with teeth.

But why tin't you get HIV from a mosquito when it's clearly the culprit in malaria, xanthous fever and dengue fever? It's all nigh the issues. There are two methods by which bloodsucking insects typically transmit affliction: the biological method and the mechanical method.

The biological route is how malaria infects more than one-half a billion people each year. Its disease agent, the Plasmodium parasite, relies on the mosquito as a get-between to settle in human hosts.

Every mosquito bite involves a female mosquito looking for a blood meal to nourish her eggs. She injects saliva to go along the blood from clotting, and an allergic reaction to the saliva makes our skin annoyingly itchy and ruby-red after the seize with teeth. If the mama mosquito happens to seize with teeth a malaria-infected person, she ingests the parasites, which cease upwardly invading her cells and replicating. They then migrate to the salivary glands from where they tin infect some other human host in her next seize with teeth.

If the blood that she sucks upwards contains HIV, though, the virus can't follow the same path equally the malaria parasite. Instead of multiplying and eventually heading for the salivary glands, the viruses get digested, and see their death in the insect's gut.

The mechanical method is the other way for bloodsucking insects to pass forth disease. Suppose a feeding mosquito is slapped away but is still hungry. Since insects don't use napkins, blood remains on its mouthparts as it flies over to seize with teeth another victim. Theoretically, if Victim 1 had HIV circulating in his bloodstream, some could end up in Victim 2.

Yet, the probability of the transaction is almost zero. For 1 thing, the mosquito needs a healthy victim inside quick buzzing altitude of the HIV-positive ane. Fifty-fifty in these conditions, the musquito'due south eating habits and the nature of HIV's presence in the bloodstream notwithstanding make information technology difficult to pick up viruses to transmit.

In a typical repast, a musquito eats but a thousandth to a hundredth of a milliliter out of the average person's 5.5 liters of blood. That'south similar drinking a ii-liter soda canteen of h2o out of an Olympic-sized pool.

From its tiny snack, the mosquito has hardly a chance of ingesting HIV. While the corporeality of the virus in blood varies from a few dozen to several hundred thousand viruses per milliliter, usually the levels are low. Blood left on the sloppy musquito's mouth is highly unlikely to have any HIV in it. If the mosquito scrap someone with one,000 viruses per milliliter, for case, there would be a ane in ten one thousand thousand take a chance of injecting just 1 virus body into some other victim.

By now, scientists take a clear understanding of the ways HIV is spread, and insects are not 1 of them. With HIV's estimated annual cost of effectually $twenty billion and immeasurable effects on its victims, we're lucky that the pesky mosquito's bite isn't some other weapon in the disease's arsenal.

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Source: https://scienceline.org/2007/12/ask-peretsman-hivmosquito/

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