WI. Possible Worldwide EBOLA Pandemic spread by Mosquito's?

WILDGEESE

Gone Fishin'
In a edition of a mid 90's Paranormal & SCI-TECH periodical called "The X-Factor, it discussed various Global Pandemic scenarios such as AIDS, Avian flu etc.

Could a Global Ebola Pandemic be caused by a Mosquito's biting an infected person and thus causing transmission via an infected Mosquito in the same way as Malaria?

If so, what percentage of deaths are we looking at?

Regards filers.
 
So far there no evidence this has been spread by insects. At least not above extremely rare cases. The primary vector is by by direct contact from one human to another & transfer of body fluid. ie: sweat, water & mucus from a sneeze or cough, vomit, urine, feces. I did not dig into the medical literature deep enough to learn if the virus can survive for long outside the human body.
 
I think Ebola is a pretty fragile beast in terms of the environment if can survive in, so I think a perfect storm of weather that is hospitable to Ebola would need to occur if it was to break out of Africa. Even then it wouldn't last long outside the tropics I think.
 
Mosquitos are eating that blood. That means it gets mixed with their digestive fluids. Microorganisms not specifically adapted to that highly destructive environment are quickly destroyed. Malaria and a few other diseases are able to spread that way, but the vast majority (HIV, Ebola, and more) would need some pretty major changes to survive it. Even viruses need time to evolve, and they need a selective pressure to cause the evolution.
 
Mosquitos are eating that blood. That means it gets mixed with their digestive fluids. Microorganisms not specifically adapted to that highly destructive environment are quickly destroyed. Malaria and a few other diseases are able to spread that way, but the vast majority (HIV, Ebola, and more) would need some pretty major changes to survive it. Even viruses need time to evolve, and they need a selective pressure to cause the evolution.

The genetic restrictions are even more profound than this. To use a mosquito as a host, a virus needs to replicate in the salivary glands of the mosquito (eg. Dengue, p.falciparum, Yellow fever virus etc.). So, Ebola would have to jump from mammalian specific into insect infection. This wont happen.

Ebola could become more easily transmissible as the air borne Reston Strain exemplifies (fortunately this strain is not human pathogenic) . The epidemic in western Africa strongly suggest that this is not as easy for Ebola as one might have feared, as this didn't happen, but it is possible.

However, there are plenty of other options using insect vectors. Zika virus is a fairly recent human entry and might acquire further mutations increasing its pathogenicity.

Bird flu while not vector borne fits the horror bill quite nicely with high mortality and proven ability to acquire mutations that increases airborne transmission without decreasing (animal) lethality.

All of these viruses (except ebola, because of funeral rites) are fortunately subject to the basic limitations of lethal viruses. If you kill the host, you stop infecting, so none are doomsday scenarios, but something like the virus in the Söderberg movie Contagion is not ASB.

If you want to go beyond that, you have to think something that is incredibly contagious or kills delayed while still being highly contagious. A human tropic and more dangerous variant of FMDV or maybe measles could be candidates for this (measles can kill by immunosuppression). No known viruses are really obvious for this kind of adaptation, but not every virus is known.
 
Also, if Ebola WERE able to make the jump to mosquito borne, then it would have done so millennia ago. So either humans in Africa would have adapted, or gone extinct.
 
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