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Asked by 12345giraffie to Alex, Claire, Kate, Marcus, Neil on 23 Jun 2014.
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Alex Lyness answered on 23 Jun 2014:
Hey 12345giraffie,
I think that is waaay beyond any of our knowledge as health engineers. Instead of getting you answer I reckon I can frame your question as a joke and come up with a few terrible punchlines instead.
Q. How can you tell if the insect was carrying a illnesses?
A. Because he looked LOUSE-y!
A. He MITE complain about a headache!
A. He looked a little GREEN-FLY!What do you reckon? Any good? 🙂
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Marcus Johns answered on 23 Jun 2014:
Short of taking a blood sample from the insect in question, I don’t think their is an easy way of finding out – they move around too quickly and are too small for a quick visual examination (assuming that something could be seen that would tell you if they were carrying an illness). Unfortunately I think that the only easy way to tell is if the population of a larger animal – such as humans – start to get the illness.
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Kate Niehaus answered on 23 Jun 2014:
As Marcus has said, there’s no easy way to tell just from looking at an insect (at least that I know of). But, if you were able to get a sample of its “blood,” (insects have a different sort of blood than humans), then you could probably DNA-sequence what’s inside and figure out which sort of bacteria or viruses are living there.
This is very similar to a cool new field called “metagenomics,” which just takes a sample from the environment and tried to use DNA sequencing and some math to try to figure out which organisms are contained inside.
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Claire Brockett answered on 24 Jun 2014:
Unfortunately it’s pretty tricky to tell – as Marcus said they are too small and quick to examine, and I’m not sure how much use a visual inspection would be. As Alex said, this is beyond my area of expertise, so short of the suggestions the other engineers have made, I can’t add anything else I’m afraid.
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