Dengue Fever Can Be Stopped By Genetically-modified Mosquitoes

Dengue Fever Can Be Stopped By Genetically-modified Mosquitoes

Scientists have discovered a recent breakthrough in science that will prevent the spread of the deadly disease, dengue fever, caused by mosquito bites.  In subtropical and tropical countries, 50 million people get infected by dengue fever per year. In Southeast Asia, dengue fever has been widespread and incident of dengue cases are increasing each year.

A mosquito bite from the dengue-carrying mosquito, Aedes Aegypi, can cause high fever, muscle and joint pain, severe headache and can potentially lead to death due to fatal complication. Currently, there is no vaccine to prevent dengue fever or it has any specific treatment. The latest promising discovery of some scientists will limit the spread of mosquito population especially dengue-carriers. Last year, they have released genetically-modified breed of mosquitoes in some areas in the Cayman Islands and in Malaysia. Australian scientists on the other hand took a different approach, according to the report of journal Nature.

Australian scientists made sure to conduct series laboratory tests before releasing the genetically-modified breed of mosquitoes. Tests were conducted to determine if the new breed of mosquitoes can actually reduce the number of dengue-carrying mosquitoes in the wild. The study was successful as the resistant mosquito was proven to be more advantageous in reproduction compared to the ordinary ones.

Resistant females can either mate ordinary and resistant mosquitoes but all of offspring will no longer carry dengue and will be resistant as well. However, if ordinary female mosquitoes will mate with a resistant male mosquito, all of the offspring will die. Australian scientists were able to release 140,000 genetically modified resistant mosquitoes in some isolated areas in northeastern part of Australia since January. By April, it was found out that 90-100% of mosquito population in the wild are resistant mosquitoes.

Posted by James Fried on Saturday August 27 2011, 5:37 AM EST. Ref: Google. All trademarks acknowledged. Filed under Featured News, Health. Comments and Trackbacks closed. Follow responses: RSS 2.0