Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Goutam Chandra,
1
* Anupam Ghosh,
2
Indranil Bhattacharjee
1
and
Susanta K. Ghosh
3
1
The University of Burdwan, West Bengal, India;
2
Bankura Christian College, West
Bengal, India;
3
National Institute of Malaria Research (ICMR), Bangalore, India
3.1 Introduction
movement of industrial and agricultural labour,
abrupt demographic and climatic changes and
development of resistance in vector species to
most of the available public health insecticides.
To reduce this increased frequency of
mosquito-borne diseases and to increase the
quality of public health, ef ective vector control
is essential. The most widely used and ef ective
control methods, especially of anopheline
malaria vectors, are insecticide-treated bed nets
and indoor residual spraying. However, lately,
the usefulness of many synthetic insecticides in
mosquito control programmes has become
limited because of the lack of novel insecticides,
the high cost of such insecticides, concern for
environmental sustainability, harmful side
ef ects on human health and other non-target
species, and increasing trends of insecticide
resistance. Thus, the need for alternative
solutions has driven researchers to look for
environmentally friendly, cheap and non-
toxic mosquito control operations, for example
the introduction of predator species against
immature stages (larva/pupa) of mosquitoes in
the aquatic habitat to reduce their population
sizes to ultimately decrease the overall disease
transmission rate. Unlike commercially available
Mosquitoes are members of the family Culicidae.
There are more than 4500 species of mosquitoes
in the world included under 34 genera, but they
mostly belong to three particular genera,
Stegomyia
(formerly
Aedes
),
Culex
and
Anopheles
(WHO, 2007). Mosquitoes are estimated to
transmit diseases to more than 700 million
people annually in Africa, South America,
Central America, Mexico and much of Asia with
more than 1 million deaths each year worldwide.
They are vectors of human disease agents that
include protozoans (malaria), viruses (yellow
fever, dengue fever, chikunguniya, epidemic
polyarthritis, Rift Valley fever, Ross River fever, St
Louis encephalitis, West Nile virus, Japanese
encephalitis, La Crosse encephalitis and several
other encephalitis type diseases) and nematodes
(fi lariasis or elephantiasis). Mosquito-borne
diseases not only cause mortality or morbidity
among the human population, but are also
instrumental for social, cultural, environmental
and economic loss of society. In recent years,
diseases are spreading to newer territories due to
the increased risk of transmission caused by
developmental activities and urbanization,
* goutamchandra63@yahoo.co.in
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