Pest control groups brace for mosquito boom in rich countries as planet warms

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Pest control companies are developing ways to combat the growing numbers of mosquitoes that carry deadly diseases like malaria and dengue fever to new areas of the world due to climate change.

Rising temperatures have led to the spread of mosquitoes illnesses at higher elevations and areas of the developed world where they were not previously prevalent.

Local transmission of dengue has been reported in several European countries including France, Spain, Croatia and Italy, as well as parts of the United States and Japan.

Initial Rentokilthe world’s largest pest control supplier, recently installed a ‘blood room’ at its UK innovation center to study the behavior of mosquitoes and other insects, which ‘will enrich our knowledge and expertise for years to come’ Chief Executive Officer Andy Ransom said.

Rentokil expects the global mosquito control market to expand from $1.6 billion in 2021 to $2.1 billion by 2026, an estimated compound annual growth rate of 5.8%.

The blood room housed mosquitoes that had “welcome” to the setup, “where we feed them human blood from a blood donation service,” Rentokil said.

“In Europe, the current trend is seeing Aedes albopictus [the Asian tiger mosquito] moving north, mainly to Italy, southern France and Spain,” Ransom said. The Asian tiger mosquito is a vector for the transmission of numerous pathogens, including dengue, yellow fever, Zika and chikungunya.

The Pest Control Group uses mosquito larvicides to remove breeding sites from small bodies of water and targeted spraying with Adulto Killer – a different type of insecticide – to exterminate mature mosquitoes from low vegetation.

Rentokil’s vector control company Vector Disease Control International has warned that diseases spread by mosquitoes and ticks “are at the forefront of growing concerns about climate change”.

The Wellcome Trust, a charitable foundation for health research, said it expects disease-carrying mosquitoes to reach up to 500 million more people than today by 2050. More than 1 billion people are estimated to be again at risk of malaria, dengue, Zika, chikungunya and many other diseases by 2080. The foundation said it is developing an open-source database to track these climate-sensitive infectious diseases.

Felipe Colón, the Wellcome Trust’s chief technology officer in data for science and health, said climate change has also increased the spread of other pests, such as termites.

Northern regions of the United States were experiencing termites in places that hadn’t previously been reported, according to Orkin, a subsidiary of US pest control group Rollins.

“There is a termite called the Formosan subterranean termite and it is found in the southeastern United States. There’s even some in California and Hawaii — it tends to be in warmer areas,” said Benjamin Hottel, technical service manager at Orkin. “There was a recent discovery in the Norfolk, Virginia area. . . that’s the furthest north they’ve ever gone.

Last year was the sixth warmest year on record since 1880, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Temperatures have risen by at least 1.1°C in the industrial age.

Experts also warned that it was difficult to predict how the reproductive cycles of insects such as mosquitoes would respond to climate change.

“When you increase the temperature, you increase the fitness for function of that process and there is usually an optimal range, but once it gets too hot the process can also fail,” said Kris Murray, professor of environmental change and health at the London Unit of the Medical Research Council of the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in The Gambia.

“A warmer climate may speed up the life cycle of temperature-dependent species,” he added. “If you are an organism that can complete multiple life cycles in, say, a year, due to more suitable temperatures caused by climate change, then that may increase the likelihood that you will be able to establish yourself in a new location if introduced or have larger populations.” great if already there.

Murray noted that climate change is expected to have, on average, a greater impact on reducing species diversity and abundance. But he had also made conditions in some European countries more hospitable to invasive insects.

“There are parts of Europe that were previously too cold to really support the mosquito very well. Climate change is warming [them] a little and makes it just a little more suitable, [so] mosquitoes may be better able to settle or survive there,” he said.

There are about 3,600 known species of mosquitoes. The Asian tiger mosquito’s native range is in Southeast Asia, but it has been widespread since the 1960s and was discovered in Albania in 1979. It is now found across much of southern and central Europe.

“Last year, France had the worst number of dengue cases that were brought from [the Asian tiger mosquito]’ said Steven White, a theoretical ecologist at the UK’s Center for Ecology and Hydrology.

The presence of this mosquito in the UK was first discovered in 2017. “The mosquitoes were likely to have been introduced from across the Channel in transit, however, they are not believed to have been able to establish themselves.” White said. “This may change in the near future due to climate change.”

A separate species of concern is the common house mosquito or Culex pipiens. “This species is resident in the UK, our modeling work indicates this [it] it is likely to increase in abundance,” White said.

“Culex pipiens is a vector of West Nile virus, which is currently absent in the UK but could be introduced via migratory birds,” he added. “Our work suggests that rising temperatures could make the risk of virus outbreaks more likely of the West Nile in the UK over the coming decades”.

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