Unleashing a New Weapon on the Mosquito: A Mosquito

Unleashing a New Weapon on the Mosquito: A Mosquito

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S. Nolen and E. Lutz,  New York Times,  2023.

Five decades ago, entomologists confronting the many kinds of suffering that mosquitoes inflict on humans began to consider a new idea: What if, instead of killing the mosquitoes (a losing proposition in most places), you could disarm them? Even if you couldn’t keep them from biting people, what if you could block them from passing on disease? What if, in fact, you could use one infectious microbe to stop another? These scientists began to consider a parasitic bacteria called Wolbachia, which lives quietly in all kinds of insect species. A female mosquito with Wolbachia passes it on in her eggs to all of her offspring, who eventually pass it on to the next generation. But Wolbachia isn’t naturally found in the mosquito species that cause humans the most problems — the Aedes aegypti, the virus carrier, and the Anopheles subspecies, which carry malaria. If it were, it might eventually render those species essentially harmless. So how do you infect a mosquito with Wolbachia?