Massive mosquito factory in Brazil aims to halt dengue
▻https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01266-9
A World Mosquito Program (WMP) staff member releases Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes in Niterói, Brazil.
Credit: WMP Brasil.
Facility will produce up to five billion bacteria-infected mosquitoes per year.
The non-profit World Mosquito Program (WMP) has announced that it will release modified mosquitoes in many of Brazil’s urban areas over the next 10 years, with the aim of protecting up to 70 million people from diseases such as dengue. Researchers have tested the release of this type of mosquito — which carries a Wolbachia bacterium that stops the insect from transmitting viruses — in select cities in countries such as Australia, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia and Vietnam. But this will be the first time that the technology is dispersed nationwide.
The mosquito strategy that could eliminate dengue
A mosquito factory will be built in a location yet to be determined in Brazil to supply the WMP’s ambitious initiative, in partnership with the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), a Brazilian public science institution in Rio de Janeiro. The facility should begin operating in 2024 and will produce up to five billion mosquitoes per year. “This will be the biggest facility in the world” to produce Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes, says Scott O’Neill, a microbiologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and head of the WMP. “And it will allow us in a short period of time to cover more people than in any other country.” Brazil has one of the highest rates of dengue infection in the world, reporting more than two million cases in 2022.
Despite the positive results from past mosquito releases, researchers expect that it will be challenging to operate the technology at such a massive scale.
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Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes have already been approved by Brazilian regulatory agencies. But the technology has not yet been officially endorsed by the World Health Organization (WHO), which could be an obstacle to its use in other countries. The WHO’s Vector Control Advisory Group has been evaluating the modified mosquitoes, and a discussion about the technology is on the agenda for the group’s next meeting later this month.
Despite the mosquitoes’ success, Luciano Moreira, a senior scientist at Fiocruz and one of WMP’s collaborators in Brazil, cautions that governments shouldn’t abandon other public-health measures, such as dengue vaccines. “The Wolbachia method is complementary, and we should work with integrated methods to control dengue, Zika and chikungunya,” he says. “This is not a silver bullet.”