Mosquito-borne

How can you protect yourself from the risk of mosquito-borne illnesses?

Many mosquito-borne diseases don't have cures or vaccines.

Researchers in the United States have identified a number of drug compounds that stop the spread of the Zika virus, potentially protecting pregnant women and their unborn babies from the mosquito-borne illness. One of the compounds already is used to treat tapeworms.

A mosquito-borne viral illness, dengue fever often begins with a severe headache and fever, then blossoms into that severe pain accompanied by vomiting, swollen glands and a rash.

The World Health Organization estimates that 2.5 billion people — more two-fifths of the world's population — are at risk of infection with Dengue fever, a mosquito-borne illness that in its worst form can cause death.

Researchers at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Maryland and Harvard University in Boston said in June that they had developed two vaccines against Zika that protected mice. Since then, a third vaccine, using a harmless cold virus, has been developed, and all of them shielded nonhuman primates against the mosquito-borne virus in experiments reported this week in the journal Science.

Zika, like dengue fever and West Nile virus, is in a family of mosquito-borne viruses called flaviviruses. A new study suggests that Zika can be much worse for people previously infected with another flavivirus. In pregnant women, it may put their babies at higher risk for serious birth defects, including microcephaly, a condition in which infants are born with abnormally small heads.

Following a dramatic decline in malaria-related deaths between 2000 and 2013, World Health Organization data show more than 430,000 kids still die from the mosquito-borne infectious disease in Africa each year.