Science
Where mosquitoes go when summer ends: Europe's overwintering playbook
The bites stop before the mosquitoes do. Culex pipiens spends the winter as a mated adult female hidden in cellars, culverts and animal sheds, while the tiger mosquito overwinters as cold-hardy eggs inside every container a household leaves standing. What survives the cold is what seeds next spring, which makes the weeks around the first frost the most useful weeks of the year for a household that wants fewer mosquitoes next season.
Read →Do mosquito sprays still work? An honest guide to insecticide resistance
Sprays and foggers can still kill mosquitoes, but in a growing number of places the mosquitoes now survive doses that once killed them. This explainer sets out what insecticide resistance actually is, what a new measurement of it found, and why layered, non-chemical prevention is the durable answer.
Read →A first independent map of the world's mosquito vectors, and a preview of where the climate is taking them
Malaria still kills more than 600,000 people a year, and dengue, spread by two mosquitoes now found on every inhabited continent, has no global case count at all. There is no single independent, openly sourced map of where the world's disease-carrying mosquitoes actually are. So we built a first one, and added a preliminary model of where warming could take the invasive tiger mosquito by 2070. It is a reason for caution, not reassurance.
Read →CliMed, the new dengue risk framework from IIT-Kharagpur: reading climate, land use, and Aedes together so India can see the season before it starts
IIT-Kharagpur's CORAL centre released CliMed on 30 June 2026, a four-layer dengue risk framework for India that reads daily climate, land use, settlement pattern and Aedes species suitability together rather than as separate inputs. It is the cleanest 2026 Indian dengue modelling signal, and the realistic first test is district-level validation against a published monsoon season.
Read →England and Wales finally have a map of where the West Nile mosquito lives
For the first time, England and Wales have a peer-reviewed, climate-aware map of where their *Culex* mosquitoes actually live. A 2026 *BMC Public Health* study from the University of Liverpool, UKHSA and APHA models the three near-identical taxa, *Cx. p. pipiens*, *Cx. p. molestus* and *Cx. torrentium*, separately, and finds the heaviest densities in the eastern and estuarine half of England. It is the baseline the UK's West Nile and Usutu preparedness has been waiting for.
Read →A £4 supermarket spray outlasted a £20 "natural" one, and two labs abroad reached the same verdict the same week.
On 1 July 2026, Which? lab-tested 12 mosquito repellents. The £4 supermarket DEET spray lasted longest; the £20 'natural' one gave essentially no protection at the two-hour mark. The same week, 60 Millions de Consommateurs in France and Consumer Reports in the US reached the same verdict: what protects you is the active-ingredient concentration and the re-application interval, not the price and not the word on the front of the pack.
Read →A £4 spray beat a £20 'natural' one. Three consumer labs just reached the same verdict on mosquito repellent.
Within a week this summer, France's 60 Millions de Consommateurs (24 June), the UK's Which? (1 July) and America's Consumer Reports each published a 2026 mosquito-repellent test. Three labs, three methods, three markets, one verdict: what keeps mosquitoes off you is the active ingredient and how often you reapply it, not the brand, the price, or the word 'natural' on the front of the can.
Read →Four mosquito-borne viruses in one reaction tube: what the first 2026 orthoflavivirus quadruplex assay means for the hospital lab that has to tell you what you have
The first 2026 methodology paper that meaningfully collapses the orthoflavivirus differential-diagnosis cost barrier for hospital labs in endemic regions: a TaqMan-MGB quadruplex assay that detects dengue, Zika, West Nile and Japanese encephalitis viruses in one reaction tube, validated against reference strains and clinical samples.
Read →7 mg/kg halved P. vivax relapse across Indonesia: what a 1,797-patient meta-analysis just said about higher-dose primaquine
An individual-patient-data meta-analysis of 1,797 P. vivax patients from seven Indonesian studies, published in Lancet Regional Health Western Pacific on 18 June 2026, finds that a total primaquine dose of 7 mg/kg roughly halves the six-month relapse rate versus 3.5 mg/kg, with a manageable haemolysis risk in G6PD-screened patients. It is the strongest single signal so far that the WHO dose recommendation can be raised.
Read →Deep learning found 31.9% of one Indonesian regency's standing water held mosquito larvae
A health team in Pangandaran flew a consumer drone over a single Indonesian regency, fed the photos to a deep-learning model, and let it pick out every puddle in 4,400 images. Every one of the 47 standing-water sites the model flagged...
Read →Toulouse released sterile mosquitoes in a cemetery. 200,000 a week is the plan.
Toulouse has begun releasing sterile male tiger mosquitoes at the Terre-Cabade cemetery, starting with several thousand and rising to 200,000 a week, with a planned scale-up across the wider treatment area. The operators are aiming for an 80% reduction and a zone largely free of the mosquito within two years. The technique is real. Until it reaches your street, your window screens still do the daily work.
Read →The Mass-Trapping Math: Below 10 Traps Per Hectare, Mosquitoes Endure. Above It, They Vanish.
A multi-year, four-island study shows that adult-mosquito mass-trapping has a sharp density threshold. At 4-6 BG traps per hectare, populations stabilise at a residual level. At or above 10 traps per hectare, operational elimination becomes consistent. The gap between 'partial suppression' and 'elimination' is not a slow gradient. It is a step.
Read →Luciano Moreira has spent fourteen years releasing dengue-blocking mosquitoes in Brazil. Time has noticed.
Luciano Moreira, CEO of Wolbito do Brasil and co-discoverer of *Wolbachia*-mediated dengue blocking in *Aedes aegypti*, has been named to Time's 2026 Health 100 and 100 Most Influential lists. The Curitiba biofactory he runs produces 100 million *Wolbachia*-infected mosquito eggs a week, and the country-scale operational reality behind the headline is harder than the awards-cycle story.
Read →Brazilian scientists matched DEET with a patchouli-oil cream, zero bites for three hours
A patchouli-oil lotion tested in the Brazilian Amazon held *Aedes aegypti* mosquitoes off for a full three hours, matching a commercial DEET cream bite-for-bite on the same protocol. The result is genuinely promising and the authors are careful to say so: the next step is toxicology, not shelves, and the formulation is not yet EPA-registered. The honest test is whether a second lab, with its own mosquitoes, gets the same answer.
Read →Alphabet is asking the EPA for 64 million Wolbachia mosquitoes in California and Florida
Google has asked the EPA for permission to release up to 64 million *Wolbachia*-infected male *Culex quinquefasciatus* across California and Florida over two years, 16 million per state per year. The technique is not new; in Singapore, Project Wolbachia has reported up to 98% suppression of *Aedes aegypti* and up to 88% reduction in dengue cases at core study sites. The Federal Register comment period closed on 5 June 2026. The science is settled; the operational question is whether it scales to two of the largest US states.
Read →25 Years to 5: Why Europe's Mosquito Outbreak Risk Has Changed Forever
When the tiger mosquito first arrived in Genoa in 1990, Europe waited 25 years for its first major arboviral outbreak. New research indexed in PubMed shows that interval has collapsed to under 5 years, and the gap between a first and second outbreak has fallen from 12 years to under 12 months. Temperature is the primary driver: every 1°C of summer warming raises outbreak hazard by 55%. What the compression means for individuals, public health systems, and risk planning.
Read →Spain's new algorithm identifies an invasive mosquito from a phone photo in five minutes
Spain's Ministry of Health has added AIMA, an artificial-intelligence tool, to the Mosquito Alert citizen-science network. It identifies invasive mosquitoes from a phone photograph in under five minutes. The tiger mosquito has now been recorded in 156 municipalities, and a second invasive species, Aedes japonicus, has been detected in the cool, green north. The published figures are plain: AIMA classifies 55 of every 100 tiger-mosquito images correctly and auto-publishes the most confident quarter.
Read →Scientists Find Chikungunya Spreads at 13°C, 3 to 5 Degrees Colder Than Europe Planned For
A study published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface has revised the minimum temperature at which chikungunya can spread from the long-cited 16-18°C down to 13.8°C. For risk planners across Northern and Central Europe, that is not a refinement. It is a season extension of several months and a geography expansion of hundreds of kilometres.
Read →In Brazil's Atlantic Forest, three of four mosquito meals are now human
A new Brazilian study published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution reports that 75% of successfully sequenced mosquito blood meals in two protected fragments of the Atlantic Forest now come from humans. Nine species fed on people, including Aedes albopictus, the same tiger mosquito already established across 369 regions of 16 European countries. The pattern is consistent with what mosquito ecology predicts when a forest's mammal community collapses.
Read →Singapore put half its households under Wolbachia. Dengue infection fell 70%.
The peer-reviewed multi-site trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine reports 80-90% suppression of Aedes aegypti and a more than 70% reduction in dengue risk in Singapore's Wolbachia release zones. By March 2026 the programme covers more than 800,000 households, its target of roughly half of all households, with five new release areas slated to come online before year end. The strongest randomised evidence yet that the bacterium belongs in every dense urban dengue toolkit.
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