Since her childhood in Papeete, in French Polynesia, mosquitoes have fascinated her: Anna-Bella Failloux wanted to dedicate her life to their study, long before the diseases they transmit became, with global warming, a subject of global concern.
“You have to accept from time to time being bitten by a mosquito. What we must avoid is that too many people fall ill and die from the infections” that they spread (dengue, chikungunya, yellow fever, Zika), underlines the 63-year-old entomologist with a mischievous look behind black-rimmed glasses, retracing for AFP the journey that led her to become a specialist on the subject at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.
In Papeete, where his parents, small traders from the third generation of Chinese immigrants, arrived at the end of the 19th century, the “postcard” decor was darkened by the omnipresence of a tropical disease: filariasis of Bancroft, transmitted by the Aedes polynesiensis mosquito and whose serious form, elephantiasis, causes terrible swelling of the legs, arms and genitals.
This is caused by mosquitoes which “inject a small worm: lodged in the lymph nodes, it blocks the circulation of the lymph”, describes the researcher, left marked by an illness which, when she was a child, affected “30% of the Polynesian population”.
Fascinated by mosquitoes, she said to herself that “working on insects is good, but working on insects of medical interest is even better”.
– In the era of warming –
With her baccalaureate in hand, this eldest of five girls won a scholarship and went to study biology in Toulouse – “what a cold winter!”. Five years later, after a DEA devoted to phytophages – plant pests, including insects – she obtained a position as an entomologist at the Malardé Institute in Papeete and began a thesis on Wuchereria bancrofti, the worm which causes filariasis.
But if her heart remains “in the overseas territories” where she would have liked to work, it is in France that she continues her work: “I met a husband in mainland France… so there you have it”, she smiles.
At the Pasteur Institute in Paris, she then began her post-doctoral fellowship and worked on dengue fever, enriching her knowledge in virology.
She then dedicated herself to mosquitoes that bite humans. “30 years ago, climate change was not on the news, nor was the mosquito, but at Pasteur, I was never told to change the subject. Fortunately I persisted: at one point, they needed me,” she laughs.
Among some 250 arboviruses transmitted by mosquitoes, 100 are pathogenic for humans and global warming and the frequency of travel “to countries where we are likely to become infected, because viruses circulate there almost all year round”, have “offered them an increasingly vast playing area”, underlines the one who leads today Pasteur’s Arboviruses and insect vectors unit.
– Hunting for larvae –
With global warming, 80% of the world’s population now runs the risk of being exposed to one or more infectious diseases long considered tropical, which cause more than a million deaths per year, the majority of them children, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
In demand all over the world – the Pasteur network has 32 institutes on five continents – the scientist meets anthropologists and climatologists for her work “at the crossroads of many disciplines and cultures”.
“I really like what I do and when you love, you don’t count,” explains the woman who inherited the sense of “hard work” from her parents. “It’s both intellectual, because I work with very intelligent people, and manual: we run after mosquitoes in nature, we search tires and landfills to find larvae…”, describes the researcher, who sewed the sails of the mosquito traps installed in Paris as part of a surveillance program.
At the head of a team of around fifteen students, technicians, engineers, Anna-Bella Failloux – whose children, one a graphic designer, the other an expert in cybersecurity, have not chosen the scientific path – will settle in 2028 in the new research center dedicated to vector-borne diseases on the site history of Pasteur in Paris, who invested 30 million euros there.
His ambition? Y “develop clean and sustainable control strategies” against the mosquito, in particular through research on its microbiota.
ref/alu/fio
