They reveal the dengue weapon to easily enter the human organism.

The discovery, published in the journal PLOS Pathogens, was made in two laboratories in Singapore and Texas, led by a Puerto Rican and Hispanic-American scientist.

It’s another step toward understanding how easily this virus is transmitted, which health organizations say affects about 390 million people and kills 21,000 people a year.

Garcia-Blanco, a renowned expert in biology and virology, proudly states in an interview with EFE that one of the Singaporean team members, Shih-Chia Yeh, discovered the existence of ribonucleic acid (sfRNA) molecules. It is produced in the saliva of female mosquitoes infected with dengue by the virus.

Another researcher, Tania Strilets, a Ukrainian-Canadian, was the one who “visualized” how the mechanism worked in her Texas lab.

“By delivering this RNA to the bite site, dengue-infected saliva paves the way for effective infection, giving the virus an advantage in the initial battle between itself and our immune system,” the scientists wrote in the paper about their findings. .

García-Blanco, “a little” of ribonucleic acid, which the mosquito “spits” into the skin, inhibits the innate immune system, the first warning that something foreign has entered us, García-Blanco abounds.

“It’s remarkable how clever these viruses are. They disrupt mosquito biology to suppress our immune responses so that infection rears its head.”

smart virus

Born 67 years ago in Puerto Rico to a Puerto Rican mother and Spanish father, García-Blanco has been chair of the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Cancer Biology at the University of Virginia for several months. He previously held similar positions at Duke University and the University of Texas.

Dengue is transmitted by female mosquitoes. aedes aegypti which is spread through the bites of infected people.

Read more: Dengue, Zika and Chikungunya cases in France

Saying that cases of human-to-human transmission are “extremely rare,” García-Blanco explains that the fight against the virus has focused on mosquitoes, because dengue fever cannot be cured and there are no fully effective vaccines.

HE aedes aegypti This scientist speaks fluent Spanish with an Iberian accent and says this is the creature that kills the most people in the world after humans.

In addition to dengue fever, yellow fever are carriers of Zika and chikungunya.

Of all these viral diseases, dengue is the most common, and thanks to global warming, the habitat of the infectious mosquito is also expanding.

Symptoms include fever, muscle and joint pain, skin rashes and bleeding that can lead to death in the worst cases.

García-Blanco points out that there are currently domestic cases of dengue fever in southern European countries and the extreme south of Latin America, in parts of Argentina and Chile where dengue was rare in the past.

In the US, where dengue has been found in Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Gulf states and Florida, the threat looms in the rest of the country, a reminder that mosquitoes have existed in the past, the scientist says. aedes aegypti in the northern states.

History tells us that Philadelphia has had epidemics of yellow fever, a disease caused by “the founder of this family of viruses,” he adds.

if he aedes aegypti Thanks to DDT, it has disappeared from these latitudes, but evolution has made mosquitoes resistant to pesticides and, at the same time, “marvelously” fit into our lifestyles in poverty-stricken megacities.

Now the eggs are laid in plastic containers, not plants, he notes.

When asked why there are no fully effective dengue vaccines, he points out that the real challenge is that there are four different types of dengue viruses (serotypes) and they have to work on all of them or they will do more harm than good. .

García-Blanco believes the vaccine from Japan’s Takeda lab is a “promise” to find a solution, and looks forward to its development by US health institutions.

“I don’t think we can use it tomorrow, but the better we understand how the virus is transmitted, the easier it will be to develop drugs against it,” he says of the mosquito saliva discovery.

Source: EFE

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