There are still many unknowns about the spread of coronavirus.
We do know though that it can be transmitted to some animals.
With temperatures starting to get warmer and summer on the way, we wondered if mosquitoes could carry the disease.
“The short answer is no,” PJ Liesch, director of the UW-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab, tells WTMJ’s Jane Matenaer.
“There’s no data to suggest any association between coronavirus and mosquitoes, or ticks for that matter. If we look at some similar diseases like SARS and MERS, we didn’t see indication for those either.”
He says the main science behind that is that coronavirus is a respiratory disease.
“When you think about diseases spread by mosquitoes or ticks, there’s a whole bunch of things that have to happen in order for transmission to occur. The first would be that the mosquito or tick would have to be able to pick up the pathogen in the first place. We know that with coronavirus, it seems to be transmitted by respiratory droplets rather than blood. Then the pathogen would have to be able to survive with the mosquito or tick, it would have to be able to reproduce within the mosquito or tick, then move to a spot that it can leave the mosquito or tick such as the salivary gland. So if at any one of these points, one of those steps is broken, transmission is not possible.”
For the full interview with Liesch on Wisconsin’s Morning News, click in the player above.