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Sterile female mosquitoes and sterile male mosquitoes will give no offspring. This new technique of sterile insects has been used successfully to significantly reduce the female population of disease-carrying mosquitoes in Guangzhou, China. ( James Gathany | CDC )
Chinese scientists have managed to reduce the number of mosquitoes in the tropical islands located near the city of Guangzhou, in southern China, through the use of low-level radiation and bacteria.
A series of experiments using the sterile radiation-based insect technique or SIT has almost eliminated the population of invasive mosquitoes Aedes albopictus or Asian tiger mosquitoes in the Shazai and Dadaosha Islands.
TSI is a form of insect-based birth control that uses radiation to sterilize male insects, which are then released to mate with wild females. These insects do not produce offspring, resulting in the decline of the insect population over time.
This technique has been used for over 60 years to control agricultural pests such as Mediterranean fruit fly. It is only recently that it has been adopted to control mosquito breeding.
Sterile and infertile mosquitoes
The field trial aims to suppress insects that spread Zika virus, dengue fever, West Nile virus, Chikungunya and other diseases. Female mosquitoes were sterilized with low intensity radiation while specially raised adult male mosquitoes were infected with three different species of Wolbachia, a parasitic microorganism, to render them sterile.
Male and female mosquitoes were released during the mating season of the 2016 and 2017 peeks. More than 200 million adult mosquitoes mbad-reared were released and the final result almost eliminated the entire population. female mosquitoes on both islands.
"We show here that the combination of incompatible and sterile insect techniques allows virtual elimination of populations in the field of the most invasive mosquito species in the world, Aedes albopictus," said the authors in their summary of the published in the Nature International Journal Of Science.
Chinese mosquito factory
Xi Zhiyong, one of the researchers and professor of the Joint Tropical Disease Control Center at Sun Yat-sen University and the University of Michigan, was running a mosquito factory in the south from China, where he had previously tried to use sterilized male mosquitoes. The government-funded mosquito breeding facility can produce 10 million high men a week.
"Our study predicts that the overall future costs of a fully operational intervention using this environmentally friendly approach will be about $ 108 a year," Xi said.
He added that the technique is cost effective compared to other mosquito control strategies.
The positive results of the Guangzhou field trial have resulted in extensive international collaboration with endemic countries, such as Singapore and Mexico. China plans to test this technique in large urban areas using sterile male mosquitoes.
Asian tiger mosquitoes are mosquitoes that bite the day and are distinguished by their single white band in the center of the head and back.
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