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from the as-long-as-they-cannot-play-futebol dept.
The Brazilian government have decided in a 2-year trial to test genetically modified variant of the male mosquito Aedes aegypti that's common in the northeastern Brazil to combat the spread of dengue fever. Dengue is endemic in three of the host cities for this summer's World Cup. "We need to provide the government alternatives because the system we are using now in Brazil doesn't work," says Aldo Malavasi, president of Moscamed, the Brazilian company that's running the trial from a lab just outside of Jacobina.
The mosquitoes in the lab have their genes modified in the lab such that their offspring dies. Only the female mosquitoes bite, so only male mosquitoes are released which mate with wild females and produce offspring that die before they can reproduce. The technique is developed by the British company Oxitec with roots in Syngenta and GeneWatch points out that Oxitec are not totally transparent about the potential risks (like spontaneous DNA alterations).
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Dunbal on Wednesday April 30 2014, @03:09AM
Absolutely flies (no pun intended) into the face of natural selection. You are hoping to modify a mosquito population by preventing them from having offspring because they breed with a finite number of modified males. There are a few things wrong with this:
The modified males will not pass on their genes by definition, since they cannot produce offspring. Therefore you will have to buy each and every lab grown mosquito (hooray for the company that sells them) to hope to influence every single generation.
You are hoping that the wild type females will actually be interested in breeding with these modified males at all. Even then, these males will be competing with wild type males, not replacing them.
Natural selection working the way it does - it will become evolutionarily advantageous for females to spot any sort of difference between the mutated males and the wild type males and avoid breeding with mutants, ensuring that your modified stock will at some point become obsolete. This will probably happen long before the population is affected in any way, certainly before it is eradicated. Mosquito generations don't take that long (about 10 days).
This reeks of a political, committee-selected solution that is a short term patch that will make some company quite rich but won't actually fix the problem and has the potential of making it much worse.
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Wednesday April 30 2014, @10:26AM
So, business as usual then.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 30 2014, @10:33AM
Well, a similar technique all but eradicated the screwworm in most all of North America. Remains to be seen whether it'll work well enough with mosquitoes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 30 2014, @10:41PM
Better or worse than DDT to prepare for the World's Cup?