GM Mosquitos Released to Control Asia's Dengue Fever
A genetically
modified mosquito carrying an artificial fragment of DNA designed to curb the
insect's fertility has been released for the first time in south-east Asia as
part of an ambitious attempt to combat deadly dengue fever that affects up to
100 million people worldwide.
The GM mosquito
has been developed by scientists at Oxford biotechnology company Oxitec to pass
on a gene that kills the insect at the larval stage of its lifecycle. Officials
in Malaysia said that the field experiment involved the release of about 6,000
male GM mosquitoes into an area of uninhabited forest to monitor their
dispersal.
If successful,
scientists hope to conduct bigger trials to test the idea that the GM males
will mate with wild female mosquitoes that will produce unviable larvae that
die before adulthood. On a big enough scale this should significantly reduce
mosquito numbers and limit the spread of the dengue virus, which is transmitted
in the bite of females.
Last year Oxitec
carried out a much larger field trial in the Cayman Islands involving the
release of about 3 million GM male mosquitoes – the first release of a GM
mosquito into the wild. The company said that the local population of the Aedes
aegypti mosquito, the species that carries the Dengue virus, fell by 80 per
cent.
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