Brazil Deploys Millions of Lab-bred Mosquitoes To Combat Dengue Epidemic (npr.org) 16
Brazil has launched a massive program to release millions of laboratory-bred mosquitoes engineered to carry Wolbachia bacteria, which prevents them from transmitting dengue virus. The initiative aims to protect 140 million Brazilians across 40 municipalities over the next decade.
The approach has already demonstrated significant results in Niteroi, where officials documented a roughly 90% drop in dengue cases when comparing the 10 years prior to the modified mosquitoes' introduction to the five years afterward. Nearly all mosquitoes in the city now carry the Wolbachia bacteria. Cases of chikungunya and Zika also fell by over 96% and 99% respectively.
The World Mosquito Program operates high-tech breeding facilities, including one in Rio de Janeiro that produces mosquitoes by the millions. A new factory in Curitiba will produce 5 billion mosquitoes in its first year. The Wolbachia bacteria, naturally present in roughly half of all insect species, creates conditions where dengue virus cannot replicate inside mosquitoes, effectively breaking the transmission cycle when these modified insects bite humans.
The approach has already demonstrated significant results in Niteroi, where officials documented a roughly 90% drop in dengue cases when comparing the 10 years prior to the modified mosquitoes' introduction to the five years afterward. Nearly all mosquitoes in the city now carry the Wolbachia bacteria. Cases of chikungunya and Zika also fell by over 96% and 99% respectively.
The World Mosquito Program operates high-tech breeding facilities, including one in Rio de Janeiro that produces mosquitoes by the millions. A new factory in Curitiba will produce 5 billion mosquitoes in its first year. The Wolbachia bacteria, naturally present in roughly half of all insect species, creates conditions where dengue virus cannot replicate inside mosquitoes, effectively breaking the transmission cycle when these modified insects bite humans.
Only millions? (Score:2)
Re:Only millions? (Score:5, Informative)
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And fuck you if you sit here and argue about food chain implications. Nothing feeds solely on mosquitoes, and anything that needs them will find alternatives anyway. ecosystems survive extinctions all the time, and evolve. We should eradicate this pest forever,
Actually there's a lot of mosquito species (~3500). The infertility method can only target one species at a time. So rather than eradicating all mosquitoes, it's more like eradicating the top 5 or so species that carries disease and likes to bite humans.
The food chain will barely notice the difference.
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No, it says 140 million brazillion. I'm not sure how many that is, but it sounds like a lot!
I'd rather kill all the female mosquitoes (Score:3, Interesting)
Just create a logic bomb that eradicates the females while producing viable males that go on to kill again.
For this particular species, the presence of a sex-determining chromosome with an "M" factor makes the offspring male. So:
Expected result: Female offspring for the modified males die. Male offspring mostly survive to infect the next generation. Every successive generation has fewer females by a factor of (1-k) where k is the fraction of modified males relative to the total population. The modified male population remains a constant percentage of the total, because production of males does not diminish. So if you release enough so that 5% of the males in an area are modified, then after 10 generations (20 weeks), you have eliminated ~40% of the population. After one year, you have eliminated 70% of the population. After two years, you've eliminated 93% of the population. Three years? 98%. Four years? 99.5%. After somewhere around 13 years, assuming the modified males don't fully die off before the unmodified males, the species should reach zero population.
Assuming there are no huge ecological problems caused by this, rinse and repeat for anopheles.
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I think the idea here is to not reduce the numbers of what is a significant source of food for a lot of animals.
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I think the idea here is to not reduce the numbers of what is a significant source of food for a lot of animals.
The thing is, only a small number of mosquito species are actively harmful to humans, so wiping out those specific species probably won't have much effect on the overall ecosystem at all.
Besides, you can always keep a cache of unmodified mosquito eggs in frozen storage. If it turns out that this theory was wrong, you'll only have to wait about 13-ish years for all of the male mosquitoes to be dead and gone before reintroducing the normal breeding pairs, and you'll eventually get back to where you started
Re:I'd rather kill all the female mosquitoes (Score:4, Informative)
Aedes Aegypti is an invasive species
Re: I'd rather kill all the female mosquitoes (Score:2, Redundant)
There are lots of things that eat insects like mosquitoes. Extincting mosquitoes reduces the food supply at the bottom of the food chain, causing ripple effects (i.e. unanticipated secondary ecological damage) throughout.
How about we don't do that? We've done an awesome job of fucking up the planet already without that kind of effort.
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Not really. Most mosquitoes are harmless to humans. Targeting those responsible for the spread of disease would have little, if any effect on the food chain.
so you can't concent (Score:1)
Re: so you can't consent (Score:2)
Wonderful time to be alive. We are no longer ruled by a superstition minority.
QDenga vaccine (Score:2)
The QDenga vaccine is another solution.