Brazil is fighting dengue with bacteria-infected mosquitos

8 months ago admin

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. As dengue cases continue to rise in Brazil, the country is facing a massive public health crisis. The viral disease, spread by mosquitoes, has sickened more…

The World Mosquito Program is about to start construction on a mass rearing facility—the biggest in the world—in Curitiba. “And we believe that will allow us to essentially cover most of urban Brazil within the next 10 years,” Callahan says.

There are also other mosquito-based approaches in the works. The UK company Oxitec has been providing genetically modified “friendly” mosquito eggs to Indaiatuba, Brazil, since 2018. The insects that hatch—all males—don’t bite. And when they mate, their female offspring don’t survive, reducing populations.

Another company, Forrest Brasil Tecnologia, has been releasing sterile male mosquitoes in parts of Ortigueira. When these males mate with wild females, they produce eggs that don’t hatch. From November 2020 to July 2022, the company recorded a 98.7% decline in the Ades aegypti population in Ortigueira.

Brazil is also working on efforts to provide its citizens with greater immunity, vaccinating the most vulnerable with a new shot from Japan and working on its own home-grown dengue vaccine.

None of these solutions are a quick fix. But they all provide some hope that the world can find ways to fight back even as climate change drives dengue and other infections to new peaks and into new territories. ““Cases of dengue fever are rising at an alarming rate,” Gabriela Paz-Bailey, who specializes in dengue at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the Washington Post. “It’s becoming a public health crisis and coming to places that have never had it before.”