The technique, which was presented at an infectious-disease conference in Malaysia last week, is said to have the potential to be used to examine people and animals' historical exposure to a variety of viruses without posing the moral and logistical concerns associated with direct testing.
According to Shelly Bolotin, a vaccine scientist at the University of Toronto in Canada, "this is a fresh and exciting technique, which demonstrates innovative methods to leverage the world around us to learn more about exposure to illness."
Niels Verhulst, a researcher at the University of Zurich who focuses on infections spread by insects, believes that it may also help with the early diagnosis of diseases like Ebola and SARS-CoV-2 in animals. Verhulst adds that it might also assist researchers in determining the animal host of a novel virus.
Antibodies, which are indicators of prior infection and can circulate in blood for months or years, have been used in earlier research to identify pathogen exposure1. Blood from a variety of animals and people can be tested using the method developed by Carla Vieira, a disease ecologist at the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Brisbane, Australia.
Ross River virus, a potentially crippling mosquito-borne illness that is native to Australia and islands in the southern Pacific Ocean, was the focus of Vieira's research. The virus is a member of the same family as yellow fever, dengue, and Japanese encephalitis.
Between 2021 and 2022, Vieira and her colleagues captured over 55,000 mosquitoes in Brisbane parks. Then extracted a few milliliters of blood from those insects that had recently eaten, and they examined it for antibodies that can bind Ross River virus. Additionally, they used DNA fragment sequencing to locate the animal host that the bug had consumed.
On November 20, Vieira announced early findings at the International Congress of Infectious Diseases in Kuala Lumpur, revealing that 480 of the captured mosquitoes were blood-engorged. More than half of the 253 samples from patients contained antibodies to the Ross River virus.
According to Carl Lowenberger, an entomologist and parasitologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, the strategy could theoretically be applied "for pretty much every pathogen that triggers an immune response in its host."
According to Eloise Skinner, a disease ecologist at Griffith University on the Gold Coast, the method is intriguing and could aid researchers in studying some diseases, such as the Japanese encephalitis that has been found in Australia, about which little is known. However, there are significant restrictions as well. For instance, the information is lacking regarding where exposed animals and people were and when they contracted the disease. According to her, this restricts the method's application in lowering the risk of virus transmission.
However, because mosquitoes don't typically migrate far, it might be used to research previous infestations in particular neighborhoods, according to Bolotin.
According to David Harley, a medical epidemiologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, a further problem with the method is that it's unclear how well the fraction of blood samples containing antibodies represents the actual number of infected individuals. It's possible that different mosquitoes dined on the same individual.
According to Skinner, the method has limited application in epidemic surveillance since blood-fed mosquitoes are notoriously difficult to trap. According to Lowenberger, female mosquitoes usually go for a dark, wet place to hide in order to digest their blood after consuming it.
In order to capture more blood-engorged mosquitoes than they would have without the concoction3, Verhulst and his associates developed a mixture based on the attraction of carbon dioxide produced by fermenting molasses to mosquitoes3. They intend to test it soon outside of the lab.
https://www.yicare-medical.com/rapid-test/infectious-disease-tests/dengue-test-kit.html
https://www.yicare-medical.com/rapid-test/infectious-disease-tests/malaria-test-kit.html