Battling Dengue and Malaria

Meet Kelly Liebman and Wei Xu.

They're graduate students and mosquito researchers in the Department of Entomology, University of California, Davis, who just received the 2009 William Hazeltine Memorial Research Fellowship Awards.

Liebman, a dengue researcher in the lab of medical entomologist-professor Thomas Scott, received $1800, and Wei Xu, a malaria researcher in the lab of chemical ecologist-professor Walter Leal, received $1000.

Both are working toward their doctorate degrees.

Liebman, currently in Peru, is studying the human blood-feeding patterns of the Aedes aegypti mosquito in the Amazonian city of Iquitos, a city with all four dengue virus serotypes.

“Over the past three decades, dengue virus (DENV) as emerged as one of the most important arthropod-borne viral infections of humans, causing as many as 50 million infections worldwide each year,” Liebman wrote in her application. “The mosquito vector of DENV, Aedes aegypti, is exceedingly efficient because it feeds frequently and almost exclusively on humans.”

Liebman received her master’s degree in public health from Yale University and her bachelor’s degree  in biology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Xu’s research targets malaria, a parasitic disease which kills more than one million people and infects some 500 million a year.  Ninety percent of malaria-related deaths occur in Africa, but the disease is also found in tropical and subtropical parts of Asia and the Americas.

Xu, whose work involves chemical ecology, or how insects detect smells,  received his bachelor’s degree in microbiology and his master’s degree in biochemistry and molecular biology from Zhongshan University, China.

The award memorializes William “Bill” Hazeltine (1926-1994), He managed the Lake County Mosquito Abatement District from 1961-64 and the Butte County Mosquito Abatement District from 1966-1992. He continued work on related projects until his death in 1994.

He was an ardent supporter of the judicious use of public health pesticides to protect public health.

Hazeltine studied entomology in the UC Berkeley graduate program, 1950-53,  and received his doctorate in entomology from Purdue University in 1962.

Medical entomologist Bruce Eldridge, now a UC Davis emeritus professor, eulogized Hazeltine at the 2005 American Mosquito Control Association conference. His talk was later published in the Journal of the American Mosquito Control Association.

Eldridge's eulogy offers insight into the life and work of Bill Hazeltine, "a man who made a difference."

"He was a medical entomologist who had a varied career in the field of mosquito biology and control," Eldridge said, "but he will forever be remembered as a man who fought in the trenches of the pesticide controversy from roughly 1960 until the end of his life, and who made the safe and efficient use of pesticides in public health a personal crusade."

You can read about the fascinating life of William Hazeltine in this PDF.

His passion and commitment live on through the student research fellowships that bear his name.