Preventing Mosquitoes With Mosquitoes (VIDEO)

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Asian Scientist Journal (Jul. 18, 2022) — It might sound counterintuitive to skinny out a crowd by including extra individuals to it; however relating to Singapore’s dengue-carrying mosquito drawback, that is perhaps a surprisingly efficient answer.

Since 2016, the Nationwide Environmental Company (NEA) of Singapore has been investigating how some specialised bug-carrying bugs may complement present dengue management measures, beneath a program referred to as Venture Wolbachia.

Naturally, the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes being launched by the NEA among the many nation’s high-rise neighborhoods aren’t any atypical crowd of bugs. For one, they’re all male, that means they don’t chunk; for one more, they don’t carry the dengue virus; and uniquely, they’ve all been bred to hold a bacterium referred to as Wolbachia inside their our bodies.

When these male mosquitoes breed with females out within the discipline, this bacterium will get handed on to their eggs—and stops them from hatching totally.

The lead to discipline trials to this point, in response to Affiliate Professor Ng Lee-Ching, could be a steep crash within the native A. aegypti inhabitants—as much as 98 % in some residential neighbourhoods—and a simultaneous plunge in native dengue fever instances. Ng, group director of the NEA’s Environmental Well being Institute, is a part of Venture Wolbachia.

“Globally, [Project Wolbachia] is the primary such examine in a high-rise panorama,” stated Ng. “Because the undertaking expands, the completely different terrain and areas have given us completely different information factors and classes which have enabled us to scale up.”

Constructing on the undertaking’s promising outcomes, in June 2022 the NEA introduced it could develop discipline trials to eight extra websites in Singapore. These will cowl a further 1,400 Housing Growth Board (HDB) blocks, bringing the overall protection of Venture Wolbachia to 31 % of all such public housing within the nation.

However simply how do an obscure bacterium and an notorious mosquito—the commonest provider of the dengue virus in city environments—mix to kind a novel instrument in an age-old public well being battle? Ng explains extra about Venture Wolbachia in an interview with Asian Scientist Journal.