Federica Lucati: 'Mosquitoes are an excellent source of information about the people they bite'

Today we meet Federica Lucati. She has a degree in Natural Sciences from the University of Padua (Italy) and a Master’s in Natural Sciences. Last June she presented her doctoral thesis entitled: Linking phylogeography and recent dispersal in high mountains: Insights from two Iberian amphibians, directed by Dr. Marc Ventura from the Center for Advanced Studies of Blanes (CEAB-CSIC) and Prof. Rui Rebelo of the Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes (cE3c) of the University of Lisbon.

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Reconstructing human-mosquito interactions at the Marimurtra Botanical Garden

On Saturday June 12, the Mosquito Alert team carried out an activity in the idyllic Marimurtra Botanical Garden in Blanes. Throughout the day, a pilot test was developed within the framework of the Human-Mosquito Interaction Project granted by the European Research Council (ERC), which aims to study the network of interactions between the tiger mosquito and people.

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The complex interaction between humans and mosquitoes

Despite the great scientific and clinical advances of the last decades, diseases transmitted by vectors such as mosquitoes continue to be one of the main threats to global public health. Diseases like dengue are a risk for hundreds of millions of people each year, while malaria still causes more than 400,000 deaths a year. These diseases have been compounded in recent years by outbreaks of Zika, chikungunya and West Nile fever. To the infections transmitted by mosquitoes must be added those of other arthropods, such as black flies, sandflies, chiches, ticks or tsetse flies, which together cause more than 26 million cases annually.

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