Green Mosquitoes Combat Dengue Fever

by Tina Kells | January 1, 2009 at 10:27 pm

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Dengue fever is a painful illness, a hemorrhagic fever, that strikes between 50 and 100 million people worldwide. It kills more than 20,000 people each year.

Researchers in Australia think they may have found a creative way to combat the disease using green mosquitoes.

Green mosquitoes are young mosquitoes who do not live long enough to spread the disease among their own communities but who are able to spread anti-bodies to humans.

By adding a life-shortening bacteria to disease-carrying mosquitoes, Australian researchers might have found a clever way to control Dengue fever, a developing world scourge now becoming common in the southern United States.
Thus infected, mosquitoes live long enough to reproduce, ensuring contagion within their own population — but their lives are too short for the Dengue-causing virus inside them to become fully mature and deadly to humans.

"We're not trying to eliminate the population, but to let a bacterial symbiont in, and then shift the population," said University of Queensland bacterial geneticist Scott O'Neill. "There will still be mosquitoes around, but only young ones. It's a biological control."

Dengue fever infects between 50 and 100 million people worldwide, causing severe flu-like symptoms and — in especially severe cases — a hemorrhagic fever that kills more than 20,000 people each year. Though treatable, the disease cannot be prevented — but not for lack of trying.