Can Genetically Modified Mosquitoes End Disease or Increase Other Health Concerns?
A private company that released genetically modified mosquitoes into the open air of the Florida Keys last spring says the experiment was a success, reports Emily Waltz for Nature. Oxitec, a United Kingdom-based biotech firm initially founded at Oxford University, released the bugs in an effort to curb wild mosquito populations.
The company has not yet published data from the experiment, but representatives said during a webinar earlier this month that the results were promising. Oxitec had already tested the genetically modified mosquitoes in the field in Brazil, Panama, the Cayman Islands and Malaysia, according to Nature, but this was the first open-air trial of genetically modified mosquitoes in the United States.
Genetically modified mosquitos could not have caused recent cases of malaria detected in Florida and Texas, as suggested in social media posts.
The modified mosquitoes, which were released only in Florida, were all male, and only female mosquitoes feed on blood, which is how they transmit the malaria parasite from person to person, a mosquito-control expert said. In addition, the type of mosquito that was modified and released to help control diseases such as dengue and Zika virus is not the species that transmits malaria. For each of the 10 mornings after the mosquito release, the scientists fanned out along the northeastern coast of this remote island, collecting cups humming with mosquitoes. They then took the insects to a makeshift lab in their hotel suite in the island’s one town, Santo Antonio, where they slid them under the light of a fluorescent microscope. Twelve of the 253 mosquitoes that had been caught glimmered with tiny particles of the green powder that clung to their scaly bodies.
The recaptured green mosquitoes offered insight into how far they flew and the size of the mosquito population, clues to the dynamics of malaria in this country. And they moved the scientists one step closer to their goal: replacing the mosquitoes that live here now with ones they have genetically modified so that they can no longer transmit the malaria parasite.
