Image

Anna-Bella Failloux, joint leader of Scientific Priority 2 – "Environmental transition & health" in the Pasteur 2030 Strategic Plan alongside Philippe Bastin and Arnaud Fontanet, was recently interviewed by the journalist Caroline Tourbe from the magazine Le Point, who presented her as a scientist and sentinel for mosquitoes.

Anna-Bella Failloux shares how she became interested in entomology from a young age and outlines her scientific career from French Polynesia to the Institut Pasteur campus via Toulouse, explaining how very early on she became aware of the health challenges associated with insects in general, and especially mosquitoes. She discusses various episodes, milestones and studies, starting with the chikungunya crisis on Reunion Island in 2005, which awakened health authorities to the urgent need to address a real-life problem that is growing every year. Anna-Bella Failloux stresses the importance of adopting a multidisciplinary approach to understand vector-borne diseases, explaining how medical entomology cannot exist in a vacuum without anthropology, geography, virology and evolutionary biology, especially "in a world in which the climate is breaking down and the risk represented by mosquitoes is growing.”

Read the article "A sentinel for mosquitoes" in Le Point (in French)

Image