2023-05-20 17:39:00
Laura Willen is a 31-year-old Belgian, born in Lanaken in the north of the country. However, it is very far from her native land that the 30-year-old puts her years of study in biomedical into practice. The young woman lives in Washington after having traveled quite a bit and garnered numerous experiences in the study of tropical diseases. She now works for the NIH (the National Institute of Health in the United States), more specifically in the area of allergies and infectious diseases.
“My area of work is the vector research laboratory”, explains Laura to the Nieuwsblad who went to meet him. “Vectors are insects that bite humans and suck their blood, transmitting diseases at the same time. The focus is on mosquitoes, but they also include ticks and some species of flies. I do research on arboviruses, such as zika and especially dengue fever. »
In this long interview given to our colleagues, the young thirty-year-old gives information about her work on dengue fever, a viral infection transmitted by mosquitoes that is still little known in Belgium. “But we will definitely hear about it more and more. At the moment, the virus is mainly spreading in (sub)tropical countries in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia. But with global warming, the tiger mosquito, which spreads the virus, is likely to appear more and more in Europe. It is increasingly present in Belgium, and the dengue virus could therefore accompany it, ”she warns.
This therefore shows the importance of his research with a view to discovering an effective vaccine against the effects of the virus. “The first time you are infected, you don’t notice much. It is only from the second time that one can fall seriously ill, ”she explains. This can result in high fever and internal bleeding. “The virus mainly affects children, in whom it can even be fatal (…) We observe very few infections in adults in the world. Therefore, dengue fever is often considered a pediatric disease, which is why most studies focus on children,” she concludes.