Health Wanted: Mosquitoes—The Bane of Summer and Public Health

The Episode

The topic: Mosquitoes—a menace for hundreds of millions of years. Now, thanks to climate change, their territory is growing and with it, the spread of disease. On this week’s episode of Health Wanted, host Laurel Bristow took a deep dive into the global impact of these needle-nosed nuisances and the new and creative ways scientists like her guest Gonzalo Vazquez-Prokopec, PhD, are swatting them away.

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The takeaway: Mosquitoes can transmit serious diseases, but there are ways to stop them.

• Mosquito-borne infectious diseases kill more than one million people each year.
• The mosquito species Culex, Anopheles, and Aedes are known for transmitting some of the world’s most significant mosquito-borne diseases.
• Mosquito-borne illnesses include dengue, West Nile virus, malaria, yellow fever, and Zika virus.
• Increasing travel and accelerating climate change may impact the spread and transmission of mosquito-borne diseases.
• Options for protection against mosquito-borne diseases include bed nets, insect repellents, antimalarial medications, removing standing water, and, for some diseases, vaccination.

The Interview

The guest: Gonzalo Vazquez-Prokopec, PhD

The key takeaways:

• Taking a holistic approach to mosquitoes that considers the environments they are found in, their role in ecosystems, and how they interact with their surroundings can be helpful when thinking of ways to control the diseases they spread.
• One promising new avenue of research involves injecting a type of bacteria into mosquitoes that blocks them from being able to transmit dengue. Vazquez-Prokopec is working on an approach to release male mosquitoes with these bacteria into the environment on a large scale (remember, only females bite), which would not only block dengue transmission but decrease the proportion of mosquitoes that are responsible for spreading the disease itself.
• The best options for mosquito control depend on the disease in question, the geographic areas involved, and the behaviors and opinions of the affected communities and people.
• The most effective method of personal protection against mosquito-borne illnesses is insect repellent. Not only can it protect you from bites, but it can reduce your chance of infecting additional mosquitoes if you are carrying a mosquito-borne disease, which in turn protects others.

The Listener Questions

ZYNs seem to be everywhere now. Are they safe?

ZYNs are essentially nicotine pouches. They don’t contain tobacco, which is part of what causes cancer from cigarettes, but they do contain nicotine, which is the addictive part of cigarettes.

Nicotine itself is not necessarily good for you. It’s associated with cardiovascular and gastrointestinal issues, it’s extremely not good for adolescents, and we know that nicotine can cause developmental delays and impacts peoples’ ability to pay attention.

ZYNs could be something that are helpful for someone who is trying to quit smoking, but for people who don’t already smoke, starting ZYNs is a bad idea, especially if they are young.

Is Ozempic causing a baby boom?

It’s possible. One thing we are seeing is that it interferes with oral contraceptives by slowing gastric emptying and impacting absorption of the medication.

Ozempic is a type of GLP-1, which could also increase fertility in some people simply through weight management that had previously impacted their cycle. It could also potentially trigger ovulation via its stimulation of certain hormones.

Overall, more research is needed, and of course, people who are on GLP-1s and have questions about pregnancy should speak to their doctor.

Catch all the listener questions and Laurel’s answers on the full episode of Health Wanted by:

• Streaming at wabe.org or the WABE app
• Subscribing on Apple or Spotify
• Watching on WABE's YouTube channel