It’s a nice day and you always want to get outside and get some fresh air. Feeling a little tingle, you find a mosquito enjoying a free feast on your arm. You slap it to death without thinking and will notice a little blood left in place. In addition to your aversion to mosquito bites, you may be worried about getting infected, including hepatitis. When a mosquito bites a person with hepatitis and then bites another person, it’s natural to wonder if the second person will get viral hepatitis. Fortunately, viral hepatitis is not transmitted by mosquitoes. Let’s look at why that is. When biting people, mosquitoes inject saliva instead of blood Because hepatitis B and C are both transmitted through contact with infected blood, people can’t help but think of mosquitoes as flying syringes. However, the “needle” used by mosquitoes to feed, called the mouthparts, actually has a complex structure, which has 2 separate tubes. When biting people, the mosquito injects saliva from one tube, the saliva functions like a lubricant, which helps the mosquito suck easier. The blood it sucks, as food flow is in a completely separate tube and is unidirectional: it flows to the mosquito. Thus, it is biologically unlikely that contaminated blood would be transmitted to others in this way. But wait, don’t mosquitoes transmit malaria and yellow fever? Why wouldn’t it transmit viral hepatitis? It is true that mosquitoes can transmit certain diseases, such as malaria and yellow fever, and it is natural to assume that they can transmit other blood-borne diseases, such as HIV and viral hepatitis. The answer is still mosquito saliva! A mosquito will inject its own saliva wherever it bites. Mosquito-borne diseases are actually transmitted through mosquito saliva, while viral hepatitis is transmitted through blood. Need more evidence? The virus is fragile Hepatitis viruses are very picky about who they infect and where they live; they like to live in the liver, and mosquitoes don’t have livers. This means that mosquitoes are not actually good hosts, and the hepatitis virus will not survive long enough in a mosquito for it to spread, if it ever does. Experts who study mosquitoes have also noticed that mosquitoes don’t actually bite 2 people in a row. After one bite, they will fly away to digest the blood they sucked, and only after a while will they bite again to feed. Because hepatitis viruses do not survive long in such a hostile environment, they do not live long enough to have a chance to infect others. Is this true of mosquitoes alone? What about insects and spiders? Mosquitoes belong to a very diverse group of organisms – arthropods – that includes many different species. Some typical arthropods include: insects, spiders, centipedes, shrimp and crayfish, among others. Experts believe that arthropods do not transmit viral hepatitis. Scientific studies on how arthropods transmit diseases are still quite scarce, especially since HIV began to appear in the 1980s. If not mosquitoes, what could transmit hepatitis C? Hepatitis C is transmitted through direct blood contact, and things that could expose you to infected blood are razors, needles (not mosquitoes) and toothbrushes. Certain behaviors are also high-risk factors for the transmission of hepatitis C. Such examples include street injecting drugs with unsterile needles and working with or having sexual contact with someone infected with hepatitis C (although this does not happen often). How long hepatitis viruses can survive outside the body There are many viruses that cause hepatitis, but only five common viruses have an affinity for the liver and cause infection. They are called hepatophilic viruses, which are commonly referred to as hepatitis viruses. Although they cause similar symptoms in the body, they are different and have different characteristics. All of these viruses can be infectious outside the body for a certain period of time, and the simple way to tell is that wet items are more infectious and dry items are less infectious.