A new genetic manipulation experiment in the field that will make people talk: in a city in Brazil, genetically modified male mosquitoes temporarily reduced the number of insects carrying the dengue virus by up to 96%.
The big downside is that this modified gene only persists for a limited number of mosquito generations, corresponding to less than a year. But it’s a track that has been considered for a long time to reduce infections with diseases transmitted by insects, such as malaria or zika.
In this case, it is a British biotechnology firm, Oxitec, which dreams of being able to attack dengue fever (and which is working on it since 2013). Dengue fever causes symptoms that are usually mild, but fatal in nearly 1% of cases. Gold, according to a WHO document, there are 390 million infections per year. This is an estimate, not all cases are reported. And warming allows mosquitoes of the species Temples of the Egyptians, which are carriers, to reproduce in new regions.
The genetic alteration targets male mosquitoes, because only females bite. The modified gene therefore ensures that only the male larvae will survive. The experiment in question here took place from May 2018 to April 2019 in four densely populated neighborhoods of Indaiatuba, in the state of Saô Paulo. It is by comparing with the neighboring districts, where these mosquitoes were not released, that the researchers arrive at this reduction in the population varying between 88 and 96%.
Most this is not a permanent solutionunderline the researchers in their postpublished on October 25 in Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology. They estimate that the modified gene eventually disappears from insect populations following six generations, or regarding six months.
Similar experiments, involving other groups of researchers, have been carried out in recent years, in Australia from 2014and in Indonesia in 2020. In the latter case, we observed a 77% reduction in dengue cases. The firm Oxitec conducted the same experiment in Florida in the summer of 2021, despite local opposition. The next target might be california. You should know that some parts of the United States are among those regions most at riskwarming helping, to see this proliferation Temples of the Egyptians.
