The ASM/ACTM Parasitology & Tropical Medicine Masterclass earlier this month was an excellent opportunity to catch up with leading experts in the field. The MicroGnome brings you a series of snapshots highlighting the weekend’s teaching. The edited highlights will be presented at the next QEIIMC Tropical Medicine Breakfast:

• Introduction to faecal parasite examination (Lynne Garcia)
• Blood parasites (Lynne Garcia)
• Molecular methods in parasitology (Jaco Verweij)
• Medical Entomology (Richard Russell)
• Clinical cases of parasitic infections (clinical centres around Australia)

No, this post has nothing to do with deception, mendacity or plain lying.

This is about the group of mosquitoes that includes Aedes aegypti; that carrier of yellow fever and dengue. A. aegypti has lyre-shaped markings on the upper surface of its thorax, black and white legs and is one of the most successful Culicine mosquitoes. Its close relative, Aedes albopictus, sometimes known as the “Asian tiger mosquito”, has a silver stripe along the length of its thorax. Both are featured in the lecture notes on Culicine mosquitoes, which form a part of the FACTM pt 1 Arbovirus infections.

So there you have it: ‘borne lyre’ is a helpful little mnemonic that links the arthropod borne (arbo-) viruses with the Aedes group, and A.aegypti, in particular.

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Medical Entomology for Students. 4th edn. M Service. Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-521-70928-6

Medical Entomology for Students

Mike Service brings his trademark clarity to this fourth edition of his highly regarded introductory textbook of medical entomology. It contains core subject material that has been tought to generations of DTM&H candidates.

Entomology is a very visual branch of the natural sciences and benefits from illustration. One of the strengths of this text is the careful choice of line diagrams that reinforce key differentiating features of disease vectors. In the 4th edition, colour figures have been added to support insect recognition skills.

Other modifications have been made for the fourth edition, particularly in recognition of recent changes in vector control. New transmission cycles for West Nile and Japanese encephalitis viruses have also been included.

The author’s emphasis on clinical and public health relevance runs from cover to cover and has led him, for example, to simplify the nomenclature used for Aedes mosquitoes. He is at pains to remind readers that this is a necessarily selective approach more suited to a subject matter primer, than to an exhaustive reference text. However, the enduring relevance of this book throughout the tropics is a measure of its continuing success.

This book has been recommended as core reading for the FACTM pt 1 exam.

Chapters:  introduction to mosquitoes, Anopheline mosquitoes, Culicine mosquitoes, black-flies, phlebotomine sand-flies, biting midges, horse-flies, tsetse-flies, house-flies and stable-flies, flies and myiasis, fleas, sucking lice, bedbus, triatomine bugs, cockroaches, soft ticks, hard ticks, scabies mites, scrub typhus mites, miscellaneous mites.