For decades, researchers have scratched their heads over how to combat deadly mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue fever — but could the solution come from producing mosquitoes?
The French company InnovaFeed, which specializes in producing insects to feed livestock, is partnering with the Australian research World Mosquito Program (WMP) to develop what it says is the first industrial-level production of mosquitoes.
These mosquitoes can then be modified and sent into wild populations to keep numbers down.
As infection rates of illnesses carried by mosquitoes increase, firms and researchers are racing to develop effective means of controlling the blood-sucking creatures’ population.
“The idea is to help cities on a large scale, with several million people,” InnovaFeed cofounder Aude Guo said.
The increase in infection rates of dengue, zika, chikungunya and yellow fever has spurred the group to scale up previous projects.
Ten years ago, WMP came up with a project — partly funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — to inoculate female mosquitoes with a bacterium that erases the transmission of viruses such as dengue to humans.
These mosquitoes, carrying the bacterium called Wolbachia, were let loose in Australia, then in Brazil, the French overseas territory of New Caledonia and Indonesia.
In Indonesia, an impact study carried out on 300,000 people demonstrated that dengue infection rates decreased by 77 percent in regions where the modified mosquitoes were introduced.
The partnership between InnovaFeed and WMP aims at taking this method to another level.
Another company Oxitec, based in the UK, but financed by US funds, got the green light from the US Environmental Protection Agency to release its lab-modified mosquitoes in Florida.
“Oxitec’s safe, non-biting male mosquitoes are designed to suppress local wild populations of disease-spreading mosquitoes,” a company spokesperson said.
“The mosquitoes carry a self-limiting gene, which means that when our mosquito males mate with wild females, their offspring inherit a copy of this gene, which prevents females from surviving to adulthood,” Oxitec added.
As a consequence, “there is a reduction in the wild pest population,” Oxitec said.
About 750 million genetically mosquitoes are to be released to battle natural mosquitoes under Florida’s blue sky.
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