In Brazil, the fight against dengue is making great strides: a factory that will produce transgenic mosquitoes has been inaugurated. Thanks to her, the vector of the disease should disappear.
Fight dengue fever with mosquitoes. Brazil officially inaugurated its first breeding of genetically modified mosquitoes on July 29. No less than 550,000 insects are “produced” every week in this futuristic infrastructure.
10 million per month
“GMO” mosquitoes to eradicate dengue from the country: Brazil’s crazy bet, thanks to Oxitec, a British company. The mosquito plant has been installed in Campina, in the region of Sao Paulo. It should eventually produce up to 10 million mosquitoes per month. The insects it produces are a bit peculiar: they have been modified to attract females Aedes aegypti, the main vector of dengue, with the aim of copulating. But the larvae produced will not reach adulthood because they do not have access to an antibiotic that will allow them to survive. This should make it possible, via the progressive extinction mechanism, to reduce the population of these little animals responsible for 800 deaths over the past 5 years.
Vivid oppositions
The company will also have to obtain the agreement of the Health Watch Agency (Anvisa). The fight is not won in advance: a first study was carried out in the Cayman Islands. The transgenic mosquitoes mated well with the non-transgenic females. But the population of individuals released was not enough to demonstrate a real impact on the mosquito population. It was only with an extrapolation that the company concluded that the approach was effective… the results of which it did not publish.
The “GMO” mosquito also has its opponents. A Brazilian environmental association recently pointed out the lack of available data, and the risk that young mosquitoes carrying the mutation could survive thanks to environmental pollution. But above all, it underlines the main risk of the disappearance of a species such as theAedes aegypti : that it gives way to another much less sympathetic insect, the tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus), vector of dengue and chikungunya.
The fact remains that the Brazilian Commission in charge of GMOs has given the project the green light. And with less than 2 years of the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, the approach is raising high hopes.
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