19 ms·
Mosquito saliva alone has profound effects on the human immune system (2018)
- timonoko 5y agoI remember sitting in Kautokeino bus with an older Sami man. Dozens of mosquitoes just sat on his forehead just waiting for something edible. I was only semi-edible with DEET. But an Italian couple was totally. It was incredible to watch, I wish I had a camera. Blood bath and genocide.
- cinbun8 5y agoWe found the gpt-3 everyone
- riffic 5y agoit makes perfect sense to me.
- ask_b123 5y agoI'm not sure why the comment is dead, but I also don't really understand the comment. Could you explain it please?
- thatguy0900 5y agoHe's giving an anecdote. Mosquitos would land on a native man but not bite him. Some mosquitos bit him(timonoko) but he had DEET on so not many did. An Italian couple got very badly bitten and spent the trip trying to slap and genocide all of the mosquitos.
- ask_b123 5y agoHa. That's what I thought but the comment's dead status swayed my outlook and made me search for another meaning :O
- timonoko 5y agoI was trying to point out that Mosquito saliva produces somekind of deterrent and antigen. It takes only few bites and days to adapt with suitable genetic background. But Italians were offended and it turned into flame war.
- riffic 5y agoI vouched your comment. I don't know why stuff needs to be downvoted to oblivion around here. HN voters, stop it and stop being so damn fickle.
- nawgz 5y agoI mostly agree, there is an omission of "edible" after "totally" that makes it read confusingly. However, I find the last sentence - "blood bath and genocide" - to be very out of place, to the point where invoking "genocide" to talk about some mosquitos getting swatted feels quite inappropriate.
- eitland 5y agoThere is a joke about mosquitoes in Northern Norway that goes like this: Two mosquitoes caught a soldier and one asked the other: should we eat him here or bring back home? To which the other mosquito answer: No, lets eat him here lest we want one of the big mosquitoes come and take him. Source: close friend who served next to the Russian border. I was south in Troms and down there they were so small we could easily kill them with a shovel or something ;-)
- messo 5y agoYeah, the mosquitoes in northern Norway can be brutal. I have family in the region and was invited on a fishing trip to one of the large salmon rivers. The air was thick with HUGE mosquitoes and after a while I gave up trying to keep them away. A blood bath indeed.
- stamourd 5y agoThe things you can learn on HN. "humanized mice footpads" are a thing.
- echelon 5y agoMice are one of the most effective research tools available right now. Many protocols use foot injury to look for heat shock response, immune recruitment, inflammation, etc. There are monoclonal lines for gene knockouts, human chimeras, etc. to aid in certain types of study.
- sillyquiet 5y agoSpeaking anecdotally - here in central Texas, we have a few species of mosquito, and my reaction to a bite varies from a small bump that goes away in a day to intense swelling and itching. And it all seemingly depends on which type of mosquito bit me.
- hendler 5y agoTiger mosquitos gave my son a strong reaction https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3708019/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3708019/
- singlow 5y agoSeems like a plausible explanation but how do you have any idea which species bit you in order to be able to draw a conclusion that there's a correlation?
- Lammy 5y agoThey're pretty visible/memorable due to their white stripes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aedes_albopictus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aedes_albopictus
- singlow 5y agoBut do you see the mosquito that bit you most of the time, unsmashed? Often enough to correlate?
- sillyquiet 5y agoSpeaking personally - not always do I notice the mosquito. But I have noticed often enough to note the difference. For me, the smaller, more stealthy mosquitos give me the small, temporary bump, but the larger more noticeable ones like the tiger mosquito or what we call zebra mosquitos (I think they are actually western encephalitis mosquitos (!)) have a more dramatic reaction.
- jmnicolas 5y ago
- personjerry 5y agoI read the abstract but it told me nothing. Could someone smarter to me help translate? What are the profound effects? What are Th1 and Th2 responses? What are cytokines? What are immune cell compositions? Overall is this a good effect or a bad effect?
- aborowie 5y agoCytokines are signaling molecules used by the immune system, there are around 20 of them with names like IL-4 and IL-10. The IL stands for inter leukin (signal between white blood cells). T Cells start as B Cells and then graduate from Thymus school after rigorous coursework (mainly don’t target and attack self). Most T helper cells stay as Th0 or undifferentiated. Th1 are specialized for inter cellular pathogens (bacteria and virus), Th2 broadly speaking are specialized for intra cellular pathogens (helminths and parasites). Pathogens that have been around for a while like bacteria, virus, helminths, and parasites have evolved to push back against immune systems to varying degrees. Source “The Body” by Bill Bryson
- yhoneycomb 5y agoI think it's so interesting how this guy asked pretty rudimentary questions and got such an amazing response. I wish the tech community could be just as nice to newcomers.
- haimez 5y agoProbably not as many “PHP App” authors in the immunology space, so frustration with newcomers could reasonably be expected to be lower.
- danboarder 5y agoRegarding understanding this as a good or bad effect, I think this is still an open question and further research is needed. My take away is that the rush to eradicating mosquitoes may have unintended consequences as we don't fully understand how symbiotic they are in the development of the human immune system.
- tartoran 5y agoWhen I was a kid I couldn't care less about mosquitoes and during the summer most of the kids' legs and arms had mosquito bites and deep scratches, but for some reason some kids were never bitten regardless of where they'd hang out or sleep. Not sure whether it's a good thing or not but now I am extremely cautious not to get any bites. This summer for example I avoided the backyard almost completely for this reason, with some exceptions when I covered myself in mosquito repellant spray. The mosquito candles I tried last time weren't very efficient in my case.
- monkeytaco 5y agoI've found these to be pretty effective. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08PDNCMMN https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08PDNCMMN
- NegativeLatency 5y agoSaved my ass (literally) in an outhouse in the Alaskan tundra this summer.
- gilbetron 5y ago+1 to those. I was shocked to actually have a repellent that really worked. When I bought two years ago, I had gotten a puppy and would work in my back yard so he and my other dog could hang around outside, chewing and messing around. Summer came and the mosquitoes were awful. Stick one of those under my chair, and I'd go from 10+ bites a minute to 1 bite per hour, if that.
- djmips 5y agoToxic to cats and bees?
- pishpash 5y agoYes, most of these are neurotoxins, at insect doses of courses.
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
- yourapostasy 5y agoIt would be quite ironic if The Great Filter turned out to be the xeno equivalent of mosquitoes spreading some unstoppable virus. Or if mosquito saliva contains the proteins(s) to unlock some medical breakthrough like some immune system stimulant that obsoletes antibiotics, or cryo-sleep. I try to keep those possibilities in mind whenever I get carried away with my fantasies of an anopheles genetic bomb, but durnit, those bites do have a convincing way about them to persuade one to a "kill 'em all" disposition. Thanks for the paper, it was a very neat read.
- jcims 5y agoAgreed. It boggles my mind that people are willing to just assume that all of the unknowns balance in our favor when it comes to wiping out mosquitoes. How many species has the human immune system had to adapt to more than mosquitoes? Yes they kill a lot of people, but its entirely possible that by normalizing the immune response against wide swaths of the planet they save a lot more.
- Vrondi 5y agoMosquitos don't kill a lot of people. The Malaria parasites kill a lot of people.
- ineedasername 5y agoWe really seem to know extraordinarily little about how our bodies work apart from physical mechanics & electrical activity. I can't even put a % on the rest except that we have barely scratched the surface. From epigenetics to the brain, metabolism, and immune system, we have a long way to go. On the other hand, we've probably made more progress in that understanding during the past 100 years than in all of the time before that. So, if our rate of knowledge acquisition is increasing, maybe that upward hill isn't quite so steep.
- amelius 5y agoThings can really speed up once we have robots that grow cells and perform experiments on them, and collect (big) data and automatically analyze the data.
- asdff 5y agoPeople already can grow up billions of cells for experiments and use supercomputers to process terabytes of sequencing data with statistical modelling. The hard part isn't the scale, but designing experiments and figuring out what evidence is needed to answer specific biological questions. That stuff you can't speed up with robotic arms and more processor cores, it takes time for people to think about these things and have conversations with others about these topics.
- EamonnMR 5y agoNot to mention the amount of time experiments take-suppose we want to know if a drug prevents an illness that takes decades to develop? Sure you can model it in a mouse, but to do that you need to know exactly what the parameters of your model are.
- amelius 5y agoI'm not so sure about that. For example, with robots you can run "for GENE in GENOME do ..." For humans even thinking about what that statement does is a lot of work already!
- BurningFrog 5y agoSounds like mosquito saliva can yield new drugs to treat immune system problems.
- KoftaBob 5y agoThis is actually the main idea behind the "Bug Bite Thing" product I came across recently. It acts as a suction tube to remove mosquito saliva from the bite and therefore minimize the immune inflammation at the site. Naturally, as soon as it came in the mail, I have yet to get a mosquito bite since.
- morsch 5y agoSo you're saying it works as a preventative, as well.
- inglor_cz 5y agoOn a related note: interestingly, humans can develop immunity to ticks. Which means that if a tick bites them, it dies. https://www.caryinstitute.org/news-insights/media-coverage/how-one-local-mans-immunity-ticks-could-save-us-all https://www.caryinstitute.org/news-insights/media-coverage/h... Utterly fascinating. Our bodies are so much more complex than I could have imagined.
- mv4 5y agoticks' bodies are pretty amazing to: https://www.cdc.gov/ticks/alpha-gal/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/ticks/alpha-gal/index.html
- Kenji 5y agoThat's interesting. I seem to kill small mosquitoes when they bite me. I've observed it multiple times. It lands, it bites and it becomes completely unresponsive. Because I was drunk at the time, I chalked it up to blood alcohol content which will yield quite a bit of alcohol if a mosquito drinks so-and-so many times its own body weight (I did some basic math) but since then it also happened when I was sober.
- parsecs 5y agoThat's very interesting as well. Could you expand a little on what you mean by them becoming completely unresponsive?
- Kenji 5y agoBasically it remains "stuck" in position and completely stops moving, even if I wait 5 minutes. Poking it causes no reaction. I can just pick it up and put it away. It is either dead or it passed out.
- nrdvana 5y agoI’ve never heard anyone have that experience before. Maybe you should share this phenomenon with some relevant scientists?
- gillytech 5y ago> … mosquito and sandfly saliva have also been shown to enhance infectivity and disease progression I wonder if it was mosquitos that have evolved to make disease they are carrying more infectious or it's the pathogen that evolved to take advantage of the mosquito's biology to make the host more likely to become infected. Regardless this is fascinating.
- hypertele-Xii 5y agoThe mosquito gains nothing from carrying the disease.
- dcolkitt 5y agoImagine if dirty needles started flying around randomly targeting children. It constantly shocks me that mosquito eradication is controversial, let alone not one of the highest priorities of society.
- fguerraz 5y agoOMG children! Therefore we must do something.
- droopyEyelids 5y agoOk.. do something, do something... how about we use cutting edge genetic modification technology to eliminate categories of life from the biosphere? Then afterwards we can talk about ethical implications and deal with unexpected consequences as the technology proliferates
- asddubs 5y agowe've accidentally killed so many species, can't we just do this one single one on purpose
- iLemming 5y agoWe still don't know enough about mosquitos to the point that we could "surgically" remove specifically those that bite humans. Remember, there are over 3000 known species of mosquito. Imagine if some alien race was like: "we need to kill all humans", and then proceed and eradicate all the apes and monkeys as well?
- yyyk 5y ago>We still don't know enough about mosquitos to the point that we could "surgically" remove specifically those that bite humans. We know enough to do just that - surgical removal is exactly what the gene drive solutions do. Even if we didn't, mosquitos are minor compared to the species being killed merely for profit. >Imagine if some alien race was like: "we need to kill all humans", and then proceed and eradicate all the apes and monkeys as well? I'd be a bit more concerned about the human part. I don't think I'll be available to care about the apes and monkeys. (Besides, the aliens are just being thorough and rational, and decided to make sure that we don't get evolved again. +1 for the alien team).
- tmaly 5y agoWhat I find interesting is how I react to mosquito bites in Southeast Asia verse how I react to bites in North America. The difference is huge.
- lossolo 5y agoCould you elaborate?
- tmaly 5y agoWhen I get bitten in Southeast Asia, the bites last at least a week. That is not the case in North America. I have surmised most people for an immunity to bites where they grew up.
- dQw4w9WgXcQ 5y agoHave you tested this with Alaskan mosquitoes?
- jokoon 5y agoOf all the place i get bit, the ankle is the worst and most sensitive place, and I always get rash and scars.
- fezzez 5y agoMosquitos are the closest thing to a predator that we have. They're by far the animal that kills the most humans (outside of other humans), and it's been that way for at least 10s of thousands of years. We already know that billions of humans have genetic mutations that specifically are there to protect us from mosquitos. So I'm not surprised that mosquitos have specific adaptations made for us either.
- joncrane 5y ago>They're by far the animal that kills the most humans Do you have a source for that?
- graderjs 5y agoTrue†. This is a great insight. So...why wipe them out? Don't you think we can learn from them? I know people are not advocating for wiping out every mosquito, only the killer ones. But still, from a purely predator dynamic, we should at least make sure we know all there is to know about this 'apex predator' (possibly a stretch, but), before we wipe them from the face of the Earth, no? :p ;) xx †I actually think we are symbionts. But people commonly just don't understand enough about how everything works to clearly see the benefits we get yet.
- autokad 5y ago"We detected both Th1 and Th2 human immune responses, and delayed effects on cytokine levels in the blood, and immune cell compositions in the skin and bone marrow, up to 7 days post-bites." I wonder if this could be a treatment for cytokine storms caused by things such as the spanish flu.
- ivoras 5y agoOne of the few things which can reliably fuck up brains are (auto)immune events. It would be impossible to collect the data but I would LOVE to see how longevity and mental faculty correlate with attractiveness to mosquitoes.
- amelius 5y agoPerhaps you could start by comparing longevity and mental faculty between countries with/without large amounts of mosquitoes.
- peanut_worm 5y agoI have always avoided bug spray because I was convinced it would give me some kind of immunity. It kind of worked in that mosquito bites barely itch anymore, but after reading this it doesn’t seem like such a good idea anymore.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Syzygies 5y agoCould we genetically engineer mosquitos to deliver Covid vaccinations?
- m30178 5y agoThis could have caused Type 1 diabetes for some?
- Chan_Yuk_Chi 5y agoYears ago, I became immune to having reactions to mosquito bites after getting bitten over a hundred times in a 20-hour timespan by at least 3 types of mosquitoes, one of which was Aedes Aegypti (the stripey bastards that carry Dengue Fever). I always knew that the redness, itching, and swelling was an autoimmune response to the introduction of certain proteins present in mosquito saliva, so I'm wondering if it's possible to override that response by introducing enough saliva (with myself as a prime example), and what the wider implications of that are.
- elevaet 5y agoI became immune too, as a kid I decided to "make peace" with mosquitos. I stopped caring so much about being bitten, and soon after stopped getting bumps and itchiness. I guess this happened just because I was bitten enough to adapt, but I still wonder if there was some psychological interplay. Sometimes I'll get a minor bump if in another country, must be a response to different proteins in the foreign mozzie saliva.
- t0rt01se 5y agoThis seems like the more sensible approach - to understand/learn how to protect ourselves from malaria/dengue/etc. rather than gene-drive systems to eradicate (certain types of?) mosquitoes.