The management of infectious disease vectors includes a wide range of strategies to control the population of species that carry and transmit infectious pathogens. Although vectors can include a variety of animals and microorganisms, this article addresses particularly mosquitoes that act as potential disease carriers. Regarding concerns from a social science and public heath perspective, the m...

Organisms from bacteria to humans have evolved under predictable daily environmental cycles owing to the Earth's rotation. This strong selection pressure has generated endogenous circadian clocks that regulate many aspects of behaviour, physiology and metabolism, anticipating and synchronising internal time-keeping to changes in the cyclical environment. In haematophagous insect vectors the cir...

Various cytopathological structures, known as inclusion bodies, are formed upon infection of cultured leafhopper cells by Rice dwarf virus, a member of the family Reoviridae. These structures include tubules of approximately 85 nm in diameter which are composed of the nonstructural viral protein Pns10 and contain viral particles. Such tubular structures were produced in heterologous non-host in...

Engineered underdominance (EU), meiotic drive (MD) and Wolbachia have been proposed as mechanisms for driving anti-pathogen transgenes into natural populations of insect vectors of human diseases. EU can drive transgenes to high and stable frequencies but requires the release of sizeable numbers of engineered insects. MD and Wolbachia either cannot maintain high frequencies of transgenes or lac...

The apple proliferation (AP) disease is spread mostly by two psyllids. Each species plays a predominant role as AP vector that changes regionally. Thus, there is an urgent need to identify the AP vectors in each region where the disease is present. This research aimed at identifying the psyllid community in apple orchards from Asturias (NW Spain) and studying their possible role in AP transmiss...

The geographic information system approach has permitted integration between demographic, socio-economic and environmental data, providing correlation between information from several data banks. In the current work, occurrence of human and canine visceral leishmaniases and insect vectors (Lutzomyia longipalpis) as well as biogeographic information related to 9 areas that comprise the city of B...

Some diseases manifest as one characteristic set of symptoms to the host, but can be caused by multiple pathogens. Control treatments based on plant symptoms can make it difficult to effectively manage such diseases, as the biology of the underlying pathogens can vary. Grapevine leafroll disease affects grapes worldwide, and is associated with several viral species in the family Closteroviridae...

Contemporary understandings of the epidemiology of Chagas disease as well as it’s clinical features, together with knowledge of the insect vectors and genotypes of the causal agent Trypanosoma cruzi are important pieces of information for comparisons with cases in the past. Evidence indicates that 4,000 years ago in northern Chile cases displaying digestive symptoms or ‘megacolon’ were frequent...

The methods of spatial statistics were applied to assess the geographical pattern of risk of Lyme borreliosis in Central Bohemia, the Czech Republic, based on retrospective data on disease contractions. The statistical risk was then compared at 15 selected localities with the infection challenge presented by ticks and insects carrying borreliae. Over 5,000 Ixodes ricinus (L.) ticks and 390 haem...

1. DDT is banned internationally for use in agriculture, but its use in malaria control remains permitted under the regulations of the Stockholm Convention. The production of DDT and its use in malaria control have never been discontinued. 2. While DDT is cheaper than most other insecticides, cost of manufacture has risen in proportion to that of petroleum, the major required raw material. More...