British super mosquitoes could be deployed worldwide to eradicate malaria.
Billionaire Bill Gates is backing the British effort to send the country’s mosquitoes across the world in an effort to stamp out the deadly disease. This would work because the super mozzies, created by UK biotech firm Oxitec, are capable of killing off their disease-ridden rivals that spread the illness responsible for over half a million deaths a year.
Oxitec genetically modifies insects to use them as biological insecticides. They work by the British mozzies being entirely male only and they carry a special gene that stops female offspring from surviving into adulthood. This is key because only the females bite and spread malaria.
So Oxitec’s all-male mosquitoes are released into the wild and mate with the wild females, whose female offspring all die off. However, the male offspring survive and, unable to bite and spread the disease, go off into the world and mate with other wild females.
This is said to be capable of “dramatically” reducing the world's mosquito population and the spread of malaria according to the Microsoft billionaire. Homeowners can also buy kits to raise the anti-malaria mosquitoes in their own garden and tests have shown they pose no risk to the environment or to humans.
More than one billion have so far been released worldwide with "no negative impacts", Bill wrote in an online blog. In Brazil they are already having a positive impact, helping eliminate dengue fever - another mosquito-transmitted disease which kills up to 40,000-a-year.
They will be introduced to Djibouti in east Africa next year to stop a rise in the number of malaria cases from 27 in 2012 to 73,000 in 2020. Now more than 7% of the population is infected. A number of other African countries like Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana are suffering from mosquitoes. The dangerous breed lives in cities and have grown resistant to anti-bug sprays.
The Daily Star reported that Gates, 67, who co-founded software giant Microsoft, said Oxitec, based in Abingdon, near Oxford, has produced a potentially "game-changing solution to mosquito control". "The fight against mosquitoes and the diseases they carry has always been a game of cat and mouse,’’ he said.
“Humans develop new interventions—like bed nets, insecticides, and treatments—to protect themselves from mosquitoes. Mosquitoes, meanwhile, have an incredible capacity to adapt, allowing them to eventually dodge or develop resistance to the latest control methods. Oxitec, however, aims to change this game from cat versus mouse to mouse versus mouse. Or in this case mosquito versus mosquito.’’
He said the company uses "mosquitoes to fight other mosquitoes". He continued: "To end malaria we need many new tools and innovations to reduce the burden of this disease and move the world closer to eradication,’’ Bill said. I’m excited about the potential of Oxitec’s technology to help Djibouti and the rest of Africa achieve this goal.’’