Free Republic

MIAMI (CBSMiami) — Florida health officials have confirmed the first case of locally acquired Dengue fever in Miami-Dade County. The infection is primarily spread through bites of infected mosquitoes. The person infected with the virus has already received medical treatment and is expected to make a full recovery. Health officials are investigating close contacts around the person to make sure more people are not infected. Miami-Dade Mosquito Control says they are conducting aggressive mosquito control efforts in the area of concern. Dengue fever can present itself as a flu-like illness with muscle aches, pain, fever and sometimes a rash. The...

An experimental vaccine against the dengue virus has been found to protect 100 percent of recipients in a clinical trial carried out by the USA's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). In the NIAID trial 21 people were vaccinated with TV003, while 20 received a placebo. Six months later they returned to be infected with a mild version of dengue-2. All 21 people who'd received the vaccine were protected against infection. All 20 members of the placebo group contracted dengue. A modified version of the vaccine is now being developed in an attempt to treat the related Zika virus....

Researchers harness bacteria to cripple insects that transmit disease. Scientists have engineered mosquitoes to carry a bacterium that confers resistance to the malaria parasite — a long-sought advance that could eventually curb malaria cases in humans. A team led by Zhiyong Xi, a medical entomologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, infected Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes with Wolbachia bacteria to produce insects that could pass the infection on to their offspring. Female mosquitoes that carried Wolbachia also bred with uninfected mates, the researchers report today in Science, swiftly spreading the malaria-blocking bacterium to entire insect populations within eight generations1. “This...