VECTORS AND THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS

Vectors are living organisms that can transmit infectious diseases between humans or from animals to humans. Many of these vectors are bloodsucking insects, which ingest disease-producing microorganisms during a blood meal from an infected host (human or animal) and later inject it into a new host during their subsequent blood meal.

Mosquitoes are the best known disease vector. Others include ticks, flies, sandflies, fleas, triatomine bugs and some freshwater aquatic snails.Mosquitoes

• Aedes
• Dengue fever
• Rift Valley fever
• Yellow fever
• Chikungunya
• Anopheles
• Malaria
• Culex
• Japanese encephalitis
• Lymphatic filariasis
• West Nile fever

Sandflies

• Leishmaniasis
• Sandfly fever (phelebotomus fever)

Ticks

• Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever
• Lyme disease
• Relapsing fever (borreliosis)
• Rickettsial diseases (spotted fever and Q fever)
• Tick-borne encephalitis
• Tularaemia

Triatomine bugs

• Chagas disease (American trypanosomiasis)

Tsetse flies

• Sleeping sickness (African trypanosomiasis)

Fleas

• Plague (transmitted by fleas from rats to humans)
• Rickettsiosis

Black flies

• Onchocerciasis (river blindness)

Aquatic snails

• Schistosomiasis (bilharziasis)