And it was one that would eventually make medical history, because it provided the first hint that Zika could be transmitted by sex. It had happened in 2008. Brian D. Foy, a skinny, boyish-looking 36-year-old vector biologist and malaria researcher at Colorado State University, was on a trip to Senegal, in East Africa. He and one of his grad students, Kevin Kobylinski, 27, were gathering mosquitoes. Photographs from their trip show them grinning and looking like ragged extras from the cast of Ghostbusters, wearing headlamps and backpack vacuum cleaners with long suction nozzles for aspirating mosquitoes out of the dark eaves of huts. They are standing on a wide dirt road in the countryside, and it is clearly hot. They are wearing cargo pants and T-shirts. “We were bitten a lot,” Brian said later. By coincidence, I had spoken to Brian in 2011, and later met him at a tropical medicine conference. His Senegal research was based on an idea I found fascinating: fighting malaria through xenointoxication, which sounds like intergalactic beer pong but is Greek for “poisoning the guest.”
