In the Brazilian city of Piracicaba, a biotech company has released into the wild an army of genetically modified male mosquitoes that will never see their children. It’s a cutting-edge tactic that aims to battle dengue fever – causes severe joint pain, vomiting, and fever, and can be deadly. The initiative’s primary target is Aedes aegypti, the main species of mosquito responsible for the 100 million dengue fever infections annually worldwide.
United Kingdom-based company Oxitec breeds male mosquitoes with a kind of “kill switch:” They produce a lethal protein if they aren’t fed a special diet laced with an antibiotic. When they are released into the wild, the males mate with the local females, and the resulting offspring inherit the fatal gene and die in their larval stage. The Oxitec team has been testing their method in the Cayman Islands, Panama and Brazil, where 6 million killer mosquitoes have been released in the suburbs of Piracicaba. The method successfully reduced the mosquito population in a Brazilian suburb by 95 percent in one test trial — far more effective than pesticides. Oxitec is hoping to do trials in the U.S. as well, the FDA has completed its review, and will publish the results for the public to weigh in, New Scientist.
The downside to Oxitec’s method is that the deadly genetic effect wipes out its carriers, which means male mosquitoes need to be repeatedly introduced. On the positive side, it should allay fears that artificially engineered genes will persist in the wild……
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