Brazil plans a mosquito macrofarm

From goats to sheep, pigs to chickens, and donkeys to sea bass, we humans have bred just about any animal that comes along.

But mosquitoes?

Those frankly annoying diptera that suck your blood and hit you with some of the most harmful diseases recorded in the history of medicine?

Well yes, that is exactly what Brazil is going to do as soon as it builds a brand new macro farm that will manufacture 5,000 million modified mosquitoes a year.

And no, Lula's government has not gone crazy.

Its goal is to protect 70 million Brazilians from dengue and other mosquito-borne ailments.

The site of the world's largest mosquito factory remains to be determined.

Brazil is very big, and I don't know how many people will be enthusiastic about such a facility close to home.

But the health authorities of the southern giant have already approved the technique involved, as have those of the United States and some other countries.

The WHO is considering the issue and has not yet ruled.

The project is run by the World Mosquito Program (WMP), a philanthropic organization led by microbiologist Scott O'Neill of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, in collaboration with the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Rio de Janeiro.

They have announced the release of 50 billion modified mosquitoes over the next 10 years over urban areas throughout Brazil.

The insects will be spread from cars, motorcycles and drones.

The key is a parasite called wolbachia, a bacterium that has lost the talent to lead a free life and can only survive inside the cells of insects.

Like all good parasites, wolbachia have a knack for making their host the kind of offers the host can't refuse.

Some insects are unable to reproduce without wolbachia

and others can not even survive.

The mosquito that tries to get rid of the bacterium signs its own death sentence, thus guaranteeing a stable presence of wolbachia in that population of diptera.

A low parasite trick, and very effective at all biological scales, from genes to societies.

mosquito

, a species that is not infected with wolbachia.

O'Neill and his group long ago showed how to introduce the parasitic bacteria into

cells .

In limited field studies—Australia, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam—wolbachia-infected mosquitoes progressively infect natives, and the result is a 77% reduction in the incidence of dengue in people, at best. the essays.

The reason is that wolbachia competes with the dengue virus in the demanding interior of the sex cells.

As there are more

with wolbachia, less there is with the virus.

Mosquitoes continue to bite, but at least they don't spread dengue, or not that much.

Another negotiation.

The anti-dengue mosquitoes have been modified, since they have put the wolbachia in the laboratory, but not genetically modified, according to the WMP.

The clarification is debatable—wolbachia has 496 gene families—but it will surely reduce the debate about the alteration of nature by quite a few decibels.

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