SYDNEY – A team of Australian scientists has identified a bacterium, called wolbachia, capable of sterilizing and eliminating the fearsome Aedes Aegypti mosquito, responsible for spreading the febrile diseases dengue, yellow fever, zika and chikungunya around the world. In 2018, they sterilized three million male mosquitoes with the bacterium, releasing them in three regions of northeastern Australia.
The project is led by the national scientific body Csiro, with the collaboration of the University of Queensland, Cook University, the Berghofer Medical Research Institute and the bioelectronic medicine company Verily Life Sciences, As described in the journal of the National Academy of Science in In the US, more than 80% of the mosquito population was killed at the three test sites during the project’s 20 weeks.
When the scientists returned the following year they observed that one of the three sites was nearly free of mosquitoes, which had been nearly suppressed at the second site. In the third site the population had recovered, due to the surviving eggs and mosquitoes from other areas.
“This is a highly targeted approach and no insecticides are used that would affect all insects in the area,” writes CSIRO medical entomologist Brendan Trewin. If the program is carried out on a large scale and repeatedly, entire populations of Aedes Aegypti could be eradicated, he adds. Meanwhile, Verily Life Sciences is already working with the Singapore government to conduct the program throughout the city-state. The bacterium sterilization technique could also be adapted to the Asian tiger mosquito, “another important carrier of the four febrile diseases, which has the same reproductive behaviors and is present in neighboring countries of Australia”, adds Trewin.
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