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In addition to being summer pests causing itching, mosquitoes kill around 830,000 people worldwide each year. This makes them more deadly than any animal on Earth, including humans.
The majority of mosquito-related deaths (more than 440,000) are malaria cases, which are transmitted from person to person in a single-cell parasite that female mosquitoes circulate when they suck our blood.
Bill and Melinda Gates are on a kind of crusade to eradicate the deadly disease since the foundation of their foundation in 2000, funding about $ 2 billion in grants to fight malaria.
The foundation is now spending 4.1 million US dollars on a new approach: sending a force of male mosquitoes exclusively meant to kill their own descendants.
This week, the foundation signed a cooperation agreement with UK-based Oxitec to develop new mosquitoes, the company said on Tuesday.
Oxitec, a genetic engineering company from Oxford University in 2002, filed its insects under the name "Friendly Mosquitoes", although these insects are anything but female mosquitoes carrying disease.
Other "friend" mosquito strains have been deployed in the past to help kill Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that may carry Zika, dengue fever and yellow fever.
They have been shipped to Brazil, the Cayman Islands and Panama, and have been tested in caged cage trials in India, the company told Business Insider. In some places, they reduced wild populations of Aedes aegypti – yellow fever and Zika carrier mosquito – by about 90 percent.
The Gates Foundation has already injected at least $ 5 million into Oxitec to develop these strains of deadly mosquitoes in 2010, but has not funded any Oxitec projects since, the company said.
How mosquito killers of malaria could work
Oxitec's new genetically engineered male mosquitoes will be released into the wild to mate with naturally occurring malaria-bearing females.
Since only female mosquitoes bite, laboratory insects will not pinch anyone once they are released.
Instead, they will mate with the females, and pass on to their offspring a "self-limiting" gene that aims to kill future generations of female mosquitoes before they reach the next generation. adulthood, when their life phase biting people starts normally.
Males may then continue to search for more female mosquitoes to impregnate the self-limiting gene up to ten other generations, the company said in a statement.
The process is not perfect. In an essay on yellow fever mosquitoes in Panama, Oxitec eventually released about one genetically modified female for every 10,000 males, but the company claims that these females are disease-free and die within a few years. days.
Finding new ways to combat the spread of malaria is becoming increasingly urgent, as cases of this disease, which decreased by 62% between 2000 and 2015, have since circumnavigated the world.
"We can confidently say that we have stopped making progress," said Pedro Alonso, director of the World Malaria Program at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Switzerland, last year. .
Alonso is worried that malaria rates have fallen, that governments around the world have changed direction and that funding for malaria control initiatives has thus stabilized.
Scientists also believe that some of the parasites responsible for the deadliest forms of malaria are becoming more resistant to drugs.
Genetically modified mosquitoes are a controversial solution
The new Oxitec mosquitoes could be ready for field testing by the fall of 2020, but the company has encountered some resistance to using genetic engineering techniques before.
Oxitec hopes to try some of its other laboratory mosquitoes in the Florida Keys this summer, even though residents have once expressed a fierce opposition to the idea.
Residents voted against the authorization of genetically modified mosquitoes in 2016. This year, Oxitec held public meetings and met with local officials in the Keys, hoping to sue the courts who voted in favor of their plans there. is two years old, The Keys Weekly reported.
Oxitec is not the only company trying to use GMO mosquitoes for the prevention of malaria.
A group of scientists from Imperial College London is also working on a mutation that would essentially sterilize female mosquitoes carrying malaria, the NPR reported in 2016. The mosquitoes have not yet come out of the laboratory.
Environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth have strongly opposed genetically modified mosquitoes, saying we do not know how these laboratory-made creatures could impact the fragile equilibria of terrestrial ecosystems.
Scientists say that the goal of releasing genetically modified mosquitoes is not to kill them all, but to make a bigger sprain for deadly diseases like Zika and Malaria.
"If we succeed, people will not even notice it," said molecular biologist Tony Nolan, who works with GMO mosquitoes at Imperial College London. Smithsonian Magazine.
"There will be a lot of mosquitoes there."
This article was published by Business Insider.
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