final result (*this news item will not be available after 01/31/2018) By Robert Preidt Thursday, November 2, 2017 THURSDAY, Nov. 2, 2017 (HealthDay News) -- Deforestation doesn't just strip the landscape. In tropical regions, it may also lead to more disease-carrying mosquitoes, University of Florida researchers say. "Converting pristine tropical forests into areas for agriculture or other uses creates a habitat for the mosquitoes that transmit human diseases," lead study author Nathan Burkett-Cadena said in a university news release. He's an assistant professor of entomology. The scientists don't say why those mosquitoes might thrive without extensive tree coverage, but they note that deforested areas are warmer and drier than similar pristine forests. For their report, the researchers analyzed 17 studies from around the world. They found a strong link between deforestation in tropical habitats and higher concentrations of mosquitoes that carry diseases transmittable to people. Almost 57 percent of mosquito species in deforested areas were confirmed carriers of human disease, compared with about 28 percent of mosquito species in forested areas, the investigators said. They also found that mosquito species capable of carrying multiple human diseases favored deforested habitats. These include Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which transmit the dengue, West Nile, yellow fever and Zika viruses. "The last couple of decades have seen an increase in efforts looking into the association between deforestation and specific diseases," said study co-author Dr. Amy Vittor. "Here we're taking a global view, comparing the distribution of mosquito species capable of carrying disease in deforested and forested areas in the tropics," added Vittor, an assistant professor in the division of infectious diseases and global medicine. The findings were published recently in the journal Basic and Applied Ecology . SOURCE: University of Florida, news release HealthDay Copyright (c) 2017 HealthDay . All rights reserved. News stories are written and provided by HealthDay and do not reflect federal policy, the views of MedlinePlus, the National Library of Medicine, the National Institutes of Health, or the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. More Health News on Mosquito Bites Recent Health News the majority
always Treeless Tropics, More Disease-Carrying Mosquitoes? many differing types
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