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Promising trial in Australia to fight dengue fever
Sydney – More than 80% of a colony of mosquitoes shedding dengue fever were wiped out in an Australian city during a promising test to combat this dangerous viral infection Scientists said Tuesday
Scientists from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), a public Australian scientific research organization, have reproduced millions of non-biting Aedes aegypti male mosquitoes as part of a funded project. by Alphabet, Google's parent company.
Insects were infected with the bacterium Wolbachia, which renders them sterile. They were later released in Innisfail, a city in the Queensland Regional State (north-east). For more than three months, they fertilized females that laid eggs that had not hatched, causing a vertiginous drop in their population.
The mosquito Aedes aegypti, one of the most dangerous in the world, is the vector dengue, Zika virus, chikungunya and yellow fever. It is responsible for the infection of millions of people each year around the world. That's why this scientific test is a major breakthrough, said Kyran Stauton, Australian University James Cook.
"We learned a lot from participating in this first tropical trial and we're excited to see this approach is applied in other areas where Aedes aegypti is a threat to life and health ", he said.
This technique of insect sterilization has been carried out in the past, but the challenge of making it successful on mosquitoes was to be able to produce enough of them, to identify the males, to remove the biting females and then to release them in numbers large enough to annihilate a population.
"We are very pleased to see a significant removal of these dangerous biting female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, "said Nigel Snoad, of the life science company Verify (Alphabet), who funded the project.
mp / ddc / rma / bfi / am
(© AFP / July 10, 2018 05:07) <! –
(AFP / 10.07.2018 07:09)
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