Insects and Diseases: A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread or Cause some of our Common DiseasesDoane, Rennie Wilbur
Science
Insects and Diseases: A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread or Cause some of our Common Diseases
Doane, Rennie Wilbur
Insect pests; Insects as carriers of disease
The whole life-history as we now know it can be summed up as follows:
The parasites develop within the circulation but certain of them seem to
wander about and do not go on with their development there. When these
particular parasites are taken into the stomach of most mosquitoes they
are digested with the rest of the blood. But when they are taken into
the stomach of a mosquito belonging to the genus _Anopheles_ or other
closely related genera they are not digested but go on with their
development, conjugation and fertilization taking place, resulting in a
more elongated form which makes its way through the walls of the stomach
on the outside of which are formed the little nodules discovered by Ross
on his mosquitoes. Within these nodules further division and development
takes place until finally the nodule is burst open and many thousand
minute rod-like organisms, sporozoites, are turned loose into the
body-cavity of the mosquito. Owing to some unknown cause these little
organisms are gathered together in the large vacuolated cells of the
salivary glands of the mosquito, and when the mosquito bites a man or
any other animal they pour down through the ducts with the secretion and
are thus again introduced in the circulation.
The nodules or cysts on the walls of the stomach of the mosquito may
contain as many as ten thousand sporozoites, and as many as five hundred
cysts may occur on a single stomach.
It takes ten, twelve or more days from the time the parasites are taken
into the stomach of the mosquito before they can go through their
transformations and reach the salivary gland, the time depending on the
temperature. So it is ten or twelve days or sometimes as much as
eighteen or twenty days from the time an _Anopheles_ bites a malarial
patient before it is dangerous or can spread the disease. On the other
hand, the sporozoites may lie in the salivary gland alive and virulent
for several weeks. It does not give up all the parasites at one time, so
that three or four or more people may be affected by a single mosquito.
It is well known that two parasites may often be seen in the same
corpuscle. This is often simply a case of multiple infection, but Dr.
Craig has very recently shown that under certain conditions two
individuals may enter the same corpuscle and conjugate and the resulting
individual will be resistant to quinine and may remain latent in the
spleen or bone marrow for a long time. Under favorable conditions it
may again begin the process of multiplication and the patient will
suffer a relapse.
SUMMARY
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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