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This is Lindsay Smith Rogers. Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to George Demopoulos, a mosquito expert at the Johns Hopkins

Bloomberg School of Public Health, about his new findings that could someday help prevent the spread

of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue, Zika, and Chickangunya. They discuss the quirks of the

mosquito's immune system that allows them to spread viruses but not succumb to them and how researchers might

be able to capitalize on that to prevent the spread of disease. Let's listen.

George Tomopoulos, thanks so much for joining me. Thank you, Stephanie. You're here today because I

want to ask you about a new discovery that you and your colleagues made

that has to do with the 80s of gypti mosquito. And in English, that's basically the mosquito

that transmits Zika and chicken guinea and denge and all kinds of human diseases. I'm curious

if you could tell us a little bit about what you found.

Yes, we have been studying mosquito infections with these human pathogenic viruses.

And one interesting observation is that these mosquitoes don't seem to get sick from infection.

And that's why they can fly around and they can

transmit these viruses. It turns out that the mosquito has an immune system like humans and other

organisms. And this immune system is also fighting these viruses. And there is a antiviral

defense system in the Eidis mosquito called the RNA interference system

that is fighting these viruses. What we found in our study was that if we inactivate a key

protein of that defense system called Orgonaut 2, the mosquitoes become very

...