This scientist is breeding billions of mosquitoes to fight disease in Brazil
This scientist is breeding billions of mosquitoes to fight disease in Brazil
Tags: Aedes, Mosquito husbandry, Mosquitoes, South/Central America, WolbachiaMariana Lenharo, Nature, 2025.
Inside a massive factory in the industrial district of Curitiba, Brazil, millions of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are breeding in a climate-controlled room filled with mesh cages. Every week, the facility produces more than 80 million mosquito eggs.
At the heart of this effort is Luciano Moreira, a soft-spoken agricultural engineer and entomologist, who opened the factory in July as part of an effort to fight mosquito-borne illnesses in the country. At the Curitiba facility, mosquitoes are infected with a bacterium called Wolbachia, which curbs the transmission of harmful human pathogens. Their offspring are being released in Brazilian cities to help to control dengue, a deadly viral disease transmitted mainly by A. aegypti.
Until recently, Wolbachia-carrying mosquitoes were released only as part of small-scale research projects. The new factory marks a shift towards nationwide adoption of the method after Brazil’s federal government recognized it as an official public-health measure to combat dengue and other mosquito-borne diseases. People credit Moreira for making the case.
“He has succeeded not only in carrying out the academic work, running experiments to demonstrate the model’s effectiveness, but also in convincing political decision-makers to implement the technology,” says Pedro Lagerblad de Oliveira, a molecular entomologist at Brazil’s Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. “This is a skill that not all scientists have.”
