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- The method involves the breeding of thousands of male mosquitoes, infecting them with a particular type of bacterium that renders female eggs unviable, and releasing them into the wild.
- It has proved very effective in a test area of Southern California.
- This method could be used to control mosquito populations in areas where insects carry deadly diseases.
In 2017, Verily, a research organization led by Alphabet, Google's parent company, launched a counterintuitive project to eliminate mosquitoes in Fresno, California.
The idea was to raise thousands of males Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, infect them with a common bacterium called Wolbachia, load them into a van and free them in the wild. Males raised in the laboratory, which do not bite humans, then breed with females, who contract Wolbachia and lay eggs. But the eggs never hatch.
Indeed, scientists from the MosquitoMate company discovered in 2016 how to infect mosquitoes with a particular type of Wolbachia that makes mosquito eggs unsustainable. The result of this large-scale sterilization strategy has been a 95% reduction in mosquito population in target areas by 2018, according to findings from the second six-month study conducted by Verily, MosquitoMate and county departments.
Image: in truth
Eliminate deadly mosquitoes in other countries
A. aegypti painful pests to southern California residents, but insects rarely transmit disease. In other climates, however, A. aegypti is known to carry dengue, chikungunya, Zika fever, Mayaro virus and yellow fever virus. If Alphabet manages to develop its mosquito elimination technology, governments and companies in South America and Africa, where the species is prevalent, could pay a lot of money. ;money.
"The essential thing is to try to be able to achieve a program like this in a very affordable and effective way," said Jacob Crawford, a Verily scientist. Bloomberg. "So that we can go to places where there is not much money.
One of the advantages of this technology is that it could reduce the use of mosquito spray trucks, which, according to some, can be harmful to humans and people. environment. (According to the Center for Disease Control, the practice is safe if it is "performed properly".) As one user of the Y Combinator website wrote, Verily's plan equates to "replacing a hammerhead" with a scalpel.
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