Freeing the Neighborhood from Dengue with Bacteria-Carrying Mosquitoes

The news source is WebMD Health News and the study was done by Monash University in Victoria, Australia. A recent study holds truth that the known dengue-carrying mosquitoes can be incapable of spreading the dengue virus after they have been literally infected with Wolbachia bacteria.

Dengue has been known to be a life-taker illness of which 50 million people across the world becomes the victim each year. Since there are four types of dengue virus, the person who gets infected with the second type of strain is more at risk of life-threatening dengue hemorrhagic fever. The only way a person can get dengue is via the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

In the study, the researchers based the results after freeing more than a quarter of a million live mosquitoes in a remote region somewhere in Australia. But before doing so, the mosquitoes were deliberately infected with a strain of a common insect bacterium, Wolbachia pipientis that makes the mosquitoes incapable of spreading the dengue virus. At the start of Australia's wet season, weekly releases of 10,000 to 22,000 bacteria-infected mosquitoes at nearly 200 sites in each town began. After the massive release, wolbachia completely infected the mosquitoes by the end of the wet season.

For the researchers, the results are exciting since the strain of wolbachia really reduces the ability of dengue virus to grow in mosquitoes. Eventually, if dengue cannot grow in mosquitoes, it cannot infect people. Because 70% of all insect species in the world are naturally infected, they are very common infectants to mosquito species that bite people but don't spread dengue. There are two reasons why wolbachia infects so many insects. First is how the infected female mosquito spreads the bacteria to all the offspring. And the other reason is how it affects the insects after killing all the offspring of an uninfected female that mate with an infected male. So as the bacterium spreads in an insect population, infected females have a tremendous evolutionary advantage.

Although the spread of dengue per se is scaring people, the neighborhoods in Queensland enthusiastically welcomed the release of hundreds of thousands of live, blood-sucking mosquitoes. This is because people are tired of being fearful and so they are quite eager to seen new control measures. With this in mind, it is a good move to have an insurance plan readily available. If you have none in mind, find the insurance best suited for you. Be ready, be equipped, and be insured.

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