Engineered sterile male mosquitoes
Brought down mosquito population in a test run in small town by 85% in 4 months.
Obviously there are some risks here, but risks have to be weighed against benefits – if we don’t do it, mosquito-borne diseases keep killing 1M people each year.
Today, worldwide, 3000 people will die of mosquito borne illnesses. 3500 will die in auto accidents. I don’t have good numbers to scale the problem of hospital errors globally — but I’m guessing between 5000 and 20000 deaths a day. These problems are easy or at least easy-ish to fix. The medical profession can break the culture of “let’s wing it” and “who has time to wash their hands?” in hospitals. It is possible to get rid of the mosquitoes that carry malaria, dengue, zika and the rest. The technology to deliver self-driving cars is close.
There are loads more real problems that kill people in huge numbers that have easy-ish ways to fix that I can name. By contrast, the terrorist attack yesterday was a single, small incident. Terrorism kills very few people.
2016-10-06: Wow, awfully clever name.
Bad mosquitoes spread disease. Good mosquitoes can stop them. Debug is a group of scientists and engineers developing technology to raise and release sterile mosquitoes to eliminate the ones that carry disease.
2016-10-08: The anti-vaxxers found a new hobby.
If the Keys scuttle the project, it may go against broader public opinion. A national survey found that 78% supported using GMO mosquitoes to fight Zika. Last month a bipartisan group of 61 Florida state legislators issued a statement asking the FDA to use emergency powers to give them Oxitec right now. “What’s happened now is you have various mosquito districts saying, ‘Why can’t we use this technology?’ ” If the vote goes against Oxitec, “we would move the trial somewhere else. But obviously it would be more preferable and more convenient to do it where we planned to do it.”
2022-07-04: Changing host smell
Some diseases can change how their hosts smell. Certain viruses and microorganisms have evolved to use this to their advantage. For instance, plants that are infected with the Cucumber mosaic virus release a molecule that attracts aphids, which the virus uses as a vector to infect new plants. Parasites that cause malaria advertise their hosts to passing mosquitoes through changes in body odor. Mice infected with Zika or dengue produced 10x as much acetophenone as did healthy mice. Daubing healthy mice — and a few human volunteers — with acetophenone revealed that mosquitoes were drawn to the smell. Giving infected mice vitamin A, which is commonly used to treat skin conditions, helped to lower the amount of acetophenone the animals exuded, potentially providing a new way to control the spread of both diseases.
2022-11-26: Data from a new field trial
treated mosquito populations were suppressed by 88-96%. Male mosquitoes have short lifespans as it is—just seven to 10 days—and the self-limiting trait becomes less prevalent in each subsequent generation of males. Eventually, it fades within the gene pool. That means more releases are needed.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 