World Mosquito Day

On 20 August 2019, World Mosquito Day was celebrated mainly by institutions and NGOs to remind everyone of the importance of fighting malaria and vector-borne diseases. This is definitely a good way to get people interested in infectious diseases.

The day was celebrated to remember a medical officer of the British army Ronald Ross who, in 1897, in India, discovered the involvement of mosquitoes in the malaria transmission cycle; this discovery earned him the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1902. However, it was an Italian scientist, Giovanni Battista Grassi and his collaborators, who discovered that the mosquitoes responsible for human malaria belonged to the genus Anopheles. Only later it was discovered that even mosquitoes belonging to the genera Aedes and Culex were able to transmit other diseases to humans, such as Dengue, Yellow Fever, West Nile, Chikungunya, Zika and Filariasis.

Today, the WHO estimates that vector-borne diseases such as mosquitoes represent 17% of all infectious diseases, causing over 700,000 deaths a year. Malaria alone causes over 400 thousand deaths per year.

The vector-borne Diseases Department and the National Reference Laboratory for Arboviruses of the Infectious Diseases Department deal with mosquito-borne diseases.

Therefore, it becomes urgent to have competent personnel who can coordinate the implementation of the control and surveillance measures of the vectors in a homogeneous manner at national level. Moreover, it is able to evaluate the results in order to build an information system with protocols and detailed instructions necessary to stop the spread of mosquitos and to limit the viral circulation in case of outbreaks.

On the basis of these principles, the Public Health Institute, in particular with the Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale of Abruzzo and Molise (IZSAM), the Emilia-Romagna Region and the Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale of Lombardia and Emilia-Romagna, has stipulated a collaboration agreement with the Ministry of Health - General Directorate of Health Prevention, for carrying out the project "Strengthen the training in public health entomology of the NHS operators as: identification, surveillance and control methods". For this reason, IZSAM organizes a 28-hour training course (from 09/11/2019 to 10/22/2019) with the primary objective of strengthening the skills of the NHS operators (and others) in public health entomology, through theoretical-practical training courses. At the end, the well-trained experts will be an active part of the process of supporting entomology in public health.

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