Mosquitoes of Malta

According to a report in The Times under the heading "Protection against mosquitoes urged" (June 22), the Health Department was asked if the mosquito species Aedes albopictus, which is a carrier of dengue fever, was ever reported from Malta. To this the Health Department replied that no diseases associated with this pest have been notified to the Disease Surveillance Unit of the Public Health Department.

It may interest readers to know that as part of its participation in a European Union project known as Fauna Europaea, concerned with cataloguing the animal biodiversity of Europe, my research group at the Department of Biology of the University of Malta keeps records on local biodiversity.

According to our information, the most recent authoritative work on the mosquitoes of the Maltese islands was that published by Paul Gatt in 1996 in the Bollettino della Società Entomologica Italiana. According to this work, nine species of mosquitoes occur in the Maltese islands, of which one has not been recorded since 1943 and is considered extinct; this species is Anopheles maculipennis, a vector of the malaria parasite. The so-called Tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus, has never been recorded from Malta.