A new genetic manipulation experiment in the field is getting people talking: In a city in Brazil, a genetically modified male mosquito reduced the number of insects that carry the dengue virus by as much as 96%.
The big downside is that this modified gene persists only for a limited number of mosquito generations, less than a year. but this A path considered for a long time To reduce infection with insect-borne diseases, such as malaria or Zika.
In this case, British biotech company Oxitec dreams of being able to attack dengue fever (which it is working to solve) Since 2013). Dengue fever causes symptoms that are usually mild but are fatal in approximately 1% of cases. He went, According to the document of the World Health OrganizationThere are 390 million injuries a year. This is an estimate, not all cases have been reported. Warming allows mosquitoes of the species Aedes aegypti Which are vectors, to breed in new areas.
The genetic change targets male mosquitoes, because only females bite. So the modified gene ensures that only the male larvae survive. The experiment described here was conducted from May 2018 to April 2019 in four densely populated neighborhoods of Indaiatuba, in the state of São Paulo. By comparing with neighboring areas, where these mosquitoes were not released, the researchers came up with this population reduction of 88 to 96%.
But This is not always a solutionUnderline researchers in their articlePosted on October 25 in Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology. They estimate that the modified gene eventually disappears from insect populations after six generations, or about six months.
Similar experiments, with the participation of other groups of researchers, have been carried out in recent years, in Australia from 2014and in Indonesia in 2020. In the latter case, we noticed Dengue cases reduced by 77%. Oxitec conducted the same experiment in Florida in the summer of 2021, Despite local opposition. Next goal could be california. You should know that some parts of the United States Among those areas are most at riskRising temperatures help to see this spread Aedes aegypti.
