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| Barry Beaty outdoors |
Like most people, Barry Beaty will smack the presumptuous mosquito that dares to bite his exposed flesh.
But he’ll pause longer than most before delivering the fatal blow: After all, he’s supervised the rearing of hundreds of thousands of mosquitoes every month in an effort to unravel their role as vectors, transferring pathogens (disease-causing viruses and bacteria) from one type of organism to another. This research into vector-borne pathogens fills Beaty with a mix of enthusiastic amazement and grim solemnity.
The study of vector-borne pathogens “is simply a fascinating field,” he says. That microbes can infect and reproduce in hosts with entirely different physiologies — such as mosquitoes and humans — continues to fascinate him. “eastern equine encephalitis virus can infect and replicate in its mosquito vector for the insect’s entire life. Yet it can infect and kill a horse in a very short period of time. Why are there such differences in what happens?”
Beaty oversees the rearing of hundreds of thousands of mosquitoes every month.
The treehole mosquito (Aedes triseriatus) transmits the virus that causes La Crosse encephalitis. Courtesy of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Why these pathogens have such complex life cycles poses another intriguing riddle. “When you think about it, these cycles seem so darn tenuous,’’ he muses. “If you were a pathogen, would you hook your survival on something like a mosquito flying around, hoping it will find a vertebrate host that’s not immune?’
An artist's rendering of the complex life cycle of the LaCrosse virus. Courtesy of Barry Beaty, © ASM News.
The amazement is tempered by reality: Beaty’s research and travels regularly remind him of the pain and suffering caused by the same vector-borne pathogens that raise such tantalizing biological questions. “If you stop and look at vector-borne diseases as an epidemiologic group, the problems are enormous.”
Malaria “is resurgent throughout much of its former range, many areas where it was controlled to a large extent. Dengue viruses and dengue hemorrhagic fever are emerging as major public health problems throughout the tropics. These resurging and emerging vector-borne diseases are due to problems such as pesticide resistance in the mosquito populations, drug resistance in the parasite populations, lack of suitable vaccines, and the collapse of public health infrastructures,” Beaty observes.
To address the public-health issues, as well as delve into the secrets of vector-borne pathogens, Beaty founded the Arthropod-borne and Infectious Diseases Laboratory at Colorado State University in 1987. The lab is situated across the street from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Division of Vector-borne Diseases; the U.S. Department of Agriculture Arthropod-borne Animal Diseases Research Laboratory is another close neighbor.
“With this relationship, our students can be trained in cutting-edge molecular biology, and also interact with and actually go work at sites that the CDC is involved in,’’ Beaty says. “I think we need to bring those sorts of skills together in people who can both function in the field and in the laboratory and bring all this marvelous knowledge of molecular biology, virology, and vector biology to bear on real-world situations.’’
Beaty’s current research focuses on the genetic mechanisms that affect the interactions between arboviruses and their mosquito vectors. In the early 1980s, he developed the first rapid diagnostic assay for an arboviral encephalitis (La Crosse).
His pride in devising the test rests not in the technological achievement, however, but in the difference it has made for victims of this virus and their caregivers. “It ensured that the proper treatment was given to a lot of children with encephalitis and provided a lot of assistance to the physicians,’’ he points out.
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