Most successful vaccines and drugs rely on protecting humans or animals by blocking certain bacteria from growing in their systems. But, a new theory actually hopes to take stopping infectious diseases such as West Nile virus and Malaria to the next level by disabling insects from transmitting these viruses.

Parents expect to pass on their eye or hair color, their knobby knees or their big feet to their children through their genes. But they don't expect to pass on viruses through those same genes.

A new study published in the journal Current Biology by researchers of the Robert Koch Institute (Berlin), the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig) and the Centre Suisse des Recherches Scientifiques (Ivory Coast) confirms the disease threat, finding the first direct evidence of virus transmission from humans to wild apes.

Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch have discovered how a key protein switch allows Chikungunya Virus (CHIKV) to spread to new vectors. The study, published December 7 in PLoS Pathogens, explains how the virus has increased its ability to infect and be transmitted by the Asian tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus.

Recent outbreaks of emerging diseases such as SARS and H5N1 avian influenza have underlined the fact that animal pathogens may acquire the ability to spread efficiently in humans – but as yet have not.

The genes that make up the immune system of the Aedes aegypti mosquito which transmits deadly viral diseases to humans have been identified in new research out today in Science.