The thought of all these mosquitoes might make one’s skin crawl. But Cabral thinks of them as her babies, and she says these insects deserve more praise than loathing. That’s because they’ve been engineered to shut down the transmission of the very diseases they usually carry and spread.
And it’s why the Brazilian government has made a massive investment to create and deploy this tiny winged armada across the country — to join their other national efforts to combat mosquito-borne diseases.
Cabral has every confidence in these mosquitoes. “They can help us,” she says.
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Talk about burying the lede. Scientists in Brazil are trying to fight Dengue Fever by spreading mosquitos that have been injected with a bacteria called Wolbachia. Apparently dengue and Wolbachia cannot coexist in mosquitos, so they are neutralizing the threat of the spread of dengue by spreading Wolbachia-laden mosquitos. They injected the bacteria by hand into a gazillion mosquito eggs (and you thought your job sucked) and are now going to put these eggs out into the world.
There are also two vaccines for Dengue Fever but misinformation campaigns during COVID have created vaccine-skepticism so they’re concerned that not enough people will get the vaccine and that their hospital system, already operating at 100 - 110% capacity, will be overwhelmed.
Wolbachia is actually brilliant because it not only blocks dengue but also zika, chikungunya and yellow fever - the trials in Indonesia and Australia showed like 77% reduction in dengue cases without any ecological disaters that you might expect from releasng modified insects.
