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Engineering Mosquitoes | Earth Wise

February 21, 2020 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Engineering mosquitoes to repel disease

Tropical regions grapple with the spread of diseases – such as dengue, yellow fever, zika, chikungunya, and malaria – by mosquitoes.  A fairly successful strategy has been the Sterile Insect Technique, which is essentially insect birth control. The process involves rearing large quantities of sterilized male mosquitoes in dedicated facilities, and then releasing them to mate with females in the wild. As they do not produce any offspring, the insect population declines over time.

A problem with this approach is that while mosquitoes create health problems for people, they also play important roles in various ecosystems, such as providing food for bats and other animals.  Eliminating mosquito populations on a large scale can trigger major changes in ecosystems.

Recently, an international team of scientists has synthetically engineered mosquitoes that halt the transmission of the dengue virus.  They genetically engineered mosquitoes with an antibody “cargo” that gets expressed in the female mosquitoes that spread the dengue virus.  Once the female mosquito takes in blood, the antibody is activated which hinders the replication of the virus and prevents its dissemination throughout the mosquito, thereby preventing its transmission to humans. Essentially, what the researchers have done is transfer genes from the human immune system to confer immunity to mosquitoes.  The researchers are testing methods to neutralize mosquitoes against other viruses they spread.

This opens up a whole new approach to interrupt mosquito-borne human diseases.  Mosquitoes are among the deadliest killers on the planet because they are the messengers that transmit deadly diseases.  Until now, the only real solution has been to kill the messenger.  The new approach may be a better way to deal with a serious problem.

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Mosquitoes engineered to repel dengue virus

Photo, posted June 20, 2014, courtesy of Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Zika Insecticides And Honeybees

November 30, 2018 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

https://earthwiseradio.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/EW-11-30-18-Zika-Insecticides-and-Honeybees.mp3

Honeybees, which play a critical role in agriculture by pollinating crops, are not native to the United States.  Beekeepers manage most honeybee colonies and they move the bees around to support farmers.        

[Read more…] about Zika Insecticides And Honeybees

Social And Ecological Underpinnings Of Infectious Disease

April 1, 2016 By WAMC WEB

https://earthwiseradio.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/EW-04-01-16-Disease.mp3

When it comes to addressing infectious disease, we have a short attention span. Forces are mobilized when we’ve crossed a tipping point, and demobilized when the immediate threat has passed. In the case of Zika, the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency based on a strong association between Zika infection and microcephaly in newborns and a spike in Guillain-Barré syndrome. 

[Read more…] about Social And Ecological Underpinnings Of Infectious Disease

Are Mosquitoes Necessary?

March 1, 2016 By WAMC WEB

https://earthwiseradio.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/EW-03-01-16-Are-Mosquitoes-Necessary.mp3

The Zika virus epidemic is yet another disease transmitted by mosquitoes.  Those tiny insects are responsible for spreading many of the world’s worst diseases such as malaria, dengue fever and yellow fever.   According to the World Health Organization, over 400,000 people worldwide died from malaria in 2015.

[Read more…] about Are Mosquitoes Necessary?

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