♦ Personal protective measures, such as using insect repellent, wearing longsleeved shirts and long pants while outdoors, and avoiding tick and mosquito habitat, reduce the risk of vector-borne diseases. Vector-borne Diseases in Hennepin County Key Findings Introduction This Epidemiology Update summarizes vector-borne disease cases and trends in Hennepin County. This issue is one in a series of...

Many biotic and abiotic factors affect the transmission efficiency of vector-borne plant pathogens. Insect vector within-plant distribution and host tissue preference are known to affect pathogen acquisition and inoculation rates. In this study, we first investigated whether feeding tissue affects the transmission of Grapevine leafroll-associated virus 3 by Planococcus ficus (Signoret) (Hemipte...

Phytoplasmas are insect-transmitted phytopathogenic bacteria that can alter plant morphology and the longevity and reproduction rates and behavior of their insect vectors. There are various examples of animal and plant parasites that alter the host phenotype to attract insect vectors, but it is unclear how these parasites accomplish this. We hypothesized that phytoplasmas produce effectors that...

Chagas disease affects millions of people in Latin America. The control of this vector-borne disease focuses on halting transmission by reducing or eliminating insect vector populations. Most transmission of Trypanosoma cruzi, the causative agent of Chagas disease, involves insects living within or very close to households and feeding mostly on domestic animals. As animal hosts can be intermitt...

Trypanosoma cruzi, the ethiologic agent of Chagas disease (Chagas 1909), is transmitted through triatomine vectors during the meal on the invertebrate host. The parasite displays quite distinct morphological and functional forms, alternating between replicative stages (epimastigotes in the vector midgut and amastigotes in vertebrate cells) and infective, non-dividing forms (metacyclic trypomast...

Cochineal is the name of both crimson or carmine dye and the cochineal insect (Dactylopius coccus), a scale insect from which the dye is derived. There are other species in the genus Dactylopius which can be used to produce cochineal extract, but they are extremely difficult to distinguish from D. coccus, even for expert taxonomists, and the latter scientific name (and the use of the term "coch...

In deriving compass information from the pattern of polarized light in the sky (celestial e-vector pattern), hymenopteran insects like bees and ants accomplish a truly formidable task. Theoretically, one could solve the task by going back to first principles and using spherical geometry to compute the exact position of the sun from single patches of polarized skylight. The insect, however, does...

African horse sickness virus (AHSV) is an arbovirus capable of successfully replicating in both its mammalian host and insect vector. Where mammalian cells show a severe cytopathic effect (CPE) following AHSV infection, insect cells display no CPE. These differences in cell death could be linked to the method of viral release, i.e. lytic or non-lytic, that predominates in a specific cell type. ...