The Shocking Way You Can Contract HIV

  Have you ever wondered
what it would be like if
mosquitoes spread HIV the
way they spread malaria;
millions of people will
definitely lose their lives on
daily basis, particularly in
developing countries like
Nigeria where mosquitoes are endemic.
Before now, there have been reports about concern of
the possibility of mosquitoes transmitting AIDS (Acquired
Immune Deficiency Syndrome) when the disease was first
recognized and many people still feel that mosquitoes may
be responsible for transmission of this infection from one
individual to another.
However, Entomologists say that although mosquitoes
function the same way as hypodermic needles – they can
both inject chemicals and extract blood but cannot
transmit HIV.
According to a former Navy Entomologist and Current
Technical Advisor for the American Mosquito Control
Association, Joe Conlon explains; “If mosquitoes carry
West Nile Virus and other blood-borne diseases,
shouldn’t they logically be able to transmit HIV, too? It
is definitely not a stupid question, but that is not the case.
Mosquitoes can not transmit HIV.
Conlon reassured that first of all, when a mosquito bites
you, it draws your blood into its gut. Acids there kill the
HIV virus.
“Even if the mosquito’s stomach acids did not render the
virus harmless, it would not be able to get back out of the
insect.
That is because mosquitoes use two different tubes to
suck up blood and to inject you with saliva that stops your
blood from clotting up while it’s drinking. Even if a
mosquito had virus-containing blood from another human
inside it, the blood would never exit the bug through its
salivary glands and into your blood stream.
“For a mosquito to transmit a disease, it must pick up the
virus. The virus has to survive in the gut and then get
outside the gut into the body cavity and then eventually
into the salivary glands to be injected into something
else. It is a very complicated process, and with HIV, it
just doesn’t happen,” he explained.
Malaria parasites, on the other hand, are able to grow in
the mosquito gut, then, migrate specifically to the salivary
glands to continue their lifecycle in another human.
Reasons
Mosquitoes’ mouth parts do not operate like a hypodermic
needle. The tube which injects the host with saliva is
separate from the canal which the mosquito uses to suck
blood from the same host. Therefore blood only flows
into the mosquito and only saliva is injected; blood is not
flushed out of the same canal.
Insect-borne diseases like Encephalitis and malaria are
spread because they multiply within the mosquito, these
diseases then move into the insect’s salivary glands and
are injected into the host with the saliva. If a mosquito
feeds on an HIV-positive person the virus cannot survive
and replicate within the mosquito’s gut as HIV requires
specialist cells found only in humans in order to multiply.
HIV circulates in the blood at lower levels than malaria
and other inset-borne diseases. The mosquito does not
take enough units of HIV from the infected person to
initiate infection.
Even if it was possible for the mosquito to inject HIV into
an uninfected person, the person would have to be bitten
by 10 million mosquitoes who had previously been feeding
on an HIV positive host in order to receive one unit of
HIV.