Can mosquitos transmit HIV?
Mosquitoes or other sucking and biting insects do not transmit HIV. For a mosquito to infect someone, it would have to bite a person who was infected. Then, it would have to both immediately travel to someone else and infect that person from tiny drops of infected blood left on the sucker, or it would have to process the virus in its saliva and inject it into the next person. Mosquitoes do neither of these things. They do not travel from person to person. They do not carry enough blood on their suckers to infect anyone else they bite. And, they do not process the virus in their saliva. Once inside a mosquito, the virus lives for only a short time. Thus, the saliva mosquitoes inject into people cannot have HIV. If HIV were spread via animals and insects, there would be a high infection rate in people of all ages.
