(NewYorkPost)Finally, a mosquito you won’t want to swat. A bio-tech start-up got the OK from the feds last Friday to release lab-grown ske...
A bio-tech start-up got the OK from the feds last Friday to release lab-grown skeeters in 20 states — including New York — an army of weaponized insects whose mission is to target wild, disease carrying mosquito populations, the journal Nature reported.
Kentucky-based MosquitoMate will infect the males, which don’t bite people, with Wolbachia pipientis bacterium — which doesn’t affects mosquitoes but not animals or humans. The hope is the males mate with female Asian tiger mosquitoes, which do bite humans, and are carriers of dangerous viral diseases, such as yellow fever and Zika.
Eggs fertilized by the dud studs don’t hatch, because the bacteria frazzles the dad’s genetic contribution. And the bacteria-infected females don’t contract viruses as easily, so their rate of transmission drops.
The company could start selling its infected mosquitoes this summer via government contracts, or direct to consumers, Gizmodo reported.
And the plan is creating a lot of buzz as an alternative to pesticides, University of Maryland entomologist David O’Brochta told Nature.
“It’s a non-chemical way of dealing with mosquitoes, so from that perspective, you’d think it would have a lot of appeal,” he told Nature. “I’m glad to see it pushed forward, as I think it could be potentially really important.”
The biggest hurdles are breeding the millions of bugs needed to make a dent in native populations, as well as separating the harmless-to-humans males from the blood-sucking females inside the lab, which workers currently do mainly by hand.
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