Vector Health Dictionary

An animal that transmits a particular infectious disease.

A vector picks up disease-causing organisms from a source of infection (such as an infected person’s or animal’s blood or faeces), carries them in or on its body, and later deposits them where they infect a new host, directly or indirectly.

Mosquitoes, fleas, lice, ticks, and flies are the most important vectors of disease to humans.

An organism which carries or transmits a pathogen from a plant or animal to another plant or animal of the same species which is free of the disease. Anopheline mosquitoes are the vectors of human malaria.

An animal that is the carrier of a particular infectious disease (see INFECTION). A vector picks up the infectious agent (bacterium – see BACTERIA; also RICKETTSIA; VIRUS) from an infected person’s blood or faeces and carries it in or on its body before depositing the agent on or into a new host. Fleas, lice, mosquitoes and ticks are among common vectors of disease to humans. When a vector is used by the infectious agent to complete part of its life-cycle – for example, the malarial agent PLASMODIUM conducts part of its life-cycle in the mosquito – the vector is described as biological. If the vector simply carries the agent but is not a host for part of its life-cycle, the vector is described as mechanical. Flies, for example, may carry an infection such as bacterial dysentery from infected faeces to the ?ngers of another ‘host’.

In infectious disease epidemiology, an insect or any living carrier that transports an infectious agent from an infected individual or its wastes to a susceptible individual or its food or immediate surroundings.

n. 1. an animal, usually an insect or a tick, that transmits parasitic microorganisms – and therefore the diseases they cause – from person to person or from infected animals to human beings. Mosquitoes, for example, are vectors of malaria, filariasis, and yellow fever. 2. an agent used to insert a foreign gene or DNA fragment into a bacterial or other cell in *genetic engineering and *gene therapy. Viruses, especially retroviruses, are often used as vectors: once inside the host cell, the virus can replicate and thus produce copies (*clones) of the gene.