Release of Mosquitoes With Suicide Genes Attempt To Eradicate Dengue Fever

Two months ago, in a remote province of Eastern Malaysia, genetically engineered mosquitoes were released into the wild in a two week experiment aiming to see if wild mosquitoes that infect humans with Dengue Fever might eventually be suppressed or eradicated. The 6000 mutant mosquitoes were the biotechnological brainchildren of Luke Alphey, chief scientific officer of the British biotech company, Oxitec. He has pioneered a technique to inject a suicide gene into a wild insect population in a single generation, causing the pest population to dramatically decline in a bug-ocalypse of dead pupae…….

Oxitec’s RIDL technology works by almost the same method that the dinosaurs of Jurassic park were controlled. The term RIDL comes from “Release of Insects carrying a Dominant Lethal”. The idea is to create mosquitoes that have two copies of a dominant suicide gene that causes them to die at a specific life stage unless they get a special chemical. You raise thousands, millions, or billions of mutant male mosquitoes in a mutant mosquito factory, getting them past the suicide stage by giving them the special chemical. In Jurassic park, the dinosaurs were deficient in lysine which had to be a regular part of their dino-chow, while Oxitec’s mosquitoes need the antibiotic tetracycline to turn off their suicide genes.

Then, hypothetically, you release the mutant male factory mosquitoes to mate with the female wild mosquitoes so the next generation of children have one copy of the dominant suicide gene but no access to the special chemical. Hopefully the mosquito population crashes, hopefully Dengue fever stops spreading, and hopefully tropical environments become a bit less dangerous to humans. If it works for Dengue, then it might work for other mosquito born illnesses such as malaria, which infects about 225 million people per year, killing over 700 thousand of them.

Sniffer rats are used to detect land mines and tuberculosis in Tanzania and Mozambique

It takes two deminers a day to clear a 200 square-metre (2,150 square-feet) minefield, but if they work with two rats they can sweep it in two hours. “They are very effective. We have very high success rates. So far they have helped re-open almost two million square metres of land” in Mozambique, said Bart Weetjens

Other rats in the same project undergo a different type of training – they learn to sniff out tuberculosis in laboratory sputum samples, providing a second-line of screening for hospitals in Tanzania where lab testing has 60 percent accuracy

Do elephants walk or run?

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Three cheetahs spare tiny antelope’s life… and play with him instead