(CBS News) - They're as much a part of summer as watermelon and sunburns. Mosquitoes are found in every state, on every continent (except Antarctica). And for them, 2012 has already been a very good year.
"We had no winter in the Northeast this year, and so there's a lot of predictions from mosquito control experts that we're going to have a really huge season of high populations of mosquitoes, and so with that, more disease transmission," said Leslie Vosshall, who runs Rockefeller University's Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior in New York City. Along with her staff, she's trying to find out exactly how mosquitoes hunt humans.
"I love mosquitoes," said Vosshall. "I have completely fallen in love with mosquitoes. They're beautiful creatures. They have beautiful behaviors. But they're dangerous."
"Most people, if you said, 'Mosquitoes are beautiful,' would tell you you're crazy," said Smith.
"Exactly. I get that a lot," she laughed.
She's really not crazy - but her dedication to her work seems jaw-droppingly insane, especially around feeding time, when Vosshall sticks her arm into a mosquito cage: "These are hungry girls and some boys," she said. Vosshall needs healthy mosquitoes for her work, and this, she says, helps keep them that way.
Only female mosquitoes bite, and only then because they need the blood to make eggs.
There are several ways to feed lab mosquitoes: this way, Vosshall says, is the best, despite what it does to her arm. "I feel good," she said. "I've done my job."
The telltale welts are the body's reaction to the saliva mosquitoes inject to make your blood flow. Over time, her body has become accustomed to this routine. Still, there's nothing routine about her work.
"What's interesting is that the really dangerous disease-causing mosquitoes have acquired a taste for humans," she said. "So Anopheles gambiae, which spread malaria, the principle vector of malaria, prefers humans over all other animals."
Besides anopheles, some other mosquitoes high on the human misery list are the dengue fever carrier Aedes aegypti, that, in this country, is found mostly in the Southeast; and Culex pipiens, a carrier of West Nile virus, that can be found coast to coast. They, too, have a taste for us . . . and some of us are mosquito magnets.
Researcher Lindsay Bellani turns mosquitoes loose on a volunteer's bare arms. "We measure how many are trying to bite the person after five minutes," Bellani explained.
Scientists here are looking at what drives them wild - blood components, skin bacteria - so they can figure out a way to stymie the mosquitoes' incredible ability to find us.
"They're not working off of very much, but they do it so, so well," said Bellani, "and in some way I've developed a weird kind of respect for mosquitoes."
The CDC has respect for mosquitoes, too. The agency was created in 1946 to fight malaria, and while malaria's been all but wiped out in the U.S., there were more than 700 reported cases of the deadly West Nile virus here last year alone.
For more on this story, visit: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3445_162-57464498/waging-a-losing-war-against-mosquitoes/?tag=stack
