Yesterday, I went to use the toilet, and I was hearing the songs of mosquitoes in their numbers. You see, mosquito is a common thing in Sub Saharan Africa and we know how to deal with them properly and in that vain, I decided to get an insecticide and I did just the right thing to them.
That creature is a very annoying scourge and its different species are just waiting to suck our blood, and spread different types of diseases. While a lot of people are familiar with the Anopheles mosquito, we really hate the Aedes aegypti mosquito which unlike anopheles which spread a protozoa, it spreads viruses. These viruses includes Zika virus, Dengue fever, and yellow fever.
According to the WHO, 3.9 billion people in over 132 countries suffered from Dengue fever in 2024 leading to severe pains in joints and muscles, headache, fevers, and headache, and so many people die from this virus not to talk about the about 249 million cases of malaria globally caused by its distant cousin the Anopheles mosquito.
In the bid to reduce or stop these diseases, a lot of steps have been taken to reduce the population of mosquitoes including draining water logged areas and wetlands, spray insecticides, and using bednets but while we do this to reduce the population of one insect, they have adverse effect on the ecosystem overtime. We can tell that there is a problem and when people like you and I see that there is a problem, researchers begin to work.
This is where Scott O'Neill from Monash University in Australia come into the picture. In other to stop the reproduction of Aedes aegypti mosquito so as to reduce the infection of dengue fever, he decided to introduce a bacteria from the Wolbachia group. Wolbachia is a group of bacteria that lives in insects and about 40% of insects carry the Wolbachia group in them.
For the bacteria, only the female line is passed down while the male do not get passed down so there can be more males than females in the population. In some insects, the males are killed, in other insects like the wood lice, the males are transformed into female. That said, Scott tried a lot of method to get Wolbachia into Aedes aegypti mosquitoes so they can prevent the transfer of dengue fever but non of his approach worked until he got an idea from Seymour Benzer who studied a strain of Wolbachia in fruit flies that causes the neurons in the head to burst and he named the strain Popcorn wolbachia.
To do this, the bacteria needed to added to the mosquitoes themselves so they can go mate and transfer to their offsprings but the bacteria strain was too potent causing the mosquitoes to die before they mate with other mosquitoes in the wild so another means needed to be used but they noticed that any strain of the bacteria prevented the growth of the virus in the insect they infect such as in the case of the fruit fly so they tried it on mosquito and they realized that the virus growth was prevented which meant that the virus could be prevented.
The bacteria was introduced to the mosquitoes and they were released into the world and in 2024, the National Environment Agency confirmed that Wolbachia-Aedes Mosquito Suppression Strategy is safe for humans while doing a great job in reducing the number of people infected with Dengue virus. Asides from Dengue, researcher also noticed that the Wolbachia in Aedes also suppressed the Zika Virus.
Last year we had a reduced number of Dengue compared to previous years and when this reaches everywhere, the number of people with Dengue and Zika virus will reduce drastically thereby solving our mosquito problem with Mosquitoes.
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Reference
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https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/vector-borne-diseases
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7612058/
https://www.monash.edu/giving/your-impact/donor-stories/wolbachia-the-buzz-word-in-dengue-prevention
https://gcgh.grandchallenges.org/sites/default/files/files/scottoneill.pdf
https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186
[https://www.nea.gov.sg/corporate-functions/resources/research](https://www.nea.gov.sg/corporate-functions/resources/research/environmental_health_institute/wolbachia-aedes-mosquito-suppression-strategy/wolbachia-is-safe#:~:text=NEA%27s%20comprehensive%20risk%20assessment%20(see,and%20insignificant%20risk%20to%20ecology.)
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7029055/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4906366/
https://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd.0011674
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9562151/