Genetically modified mosquitoes could defeat malaria
Malaria continues to claim an average of 400 thousand victims a year, although there are countries with strict sanitary control, in others it is impossible to control it, either due to scarce economic resources or the disbelief of the population.
International organizations are the ones that begin to act in favor of these regions of extreme poverty. Recently, 6,400 sterile male Anopheles gambiae were created, which were released in a village in Burkina Faso and began to fight the Malaria mosquito.
One of the people in charge of the Target Malaria project is the entomologist Moussa Namountougou who has an insectarium with thousands of genetically modified mosquitoes, with the intention of turning them into a weapon for Malaria.
Mosquitoes have become resistant to traditional controls. It is no longer only intended to use chemicals to kill them, but to eliminate the chain of proliferation. The central idea of the project is that the released males put a defective gene in the females, who are the ones that transmit the disease.
El Paludismo o Malaria una infección transmitida por un mosquito. Existen 87 países del mundo con casos de paludismo o malaria, la mayoría registrados en África, Asia y América. Según la...webmediums.com
The plan is that by not allowing the production of eggs, the females end their lives cycle without infecting people with malaria. The experiments consisted of reproducing females with males in a closed laboratory, where the males were sterile, while the females were not.
The objective is that the females begin to have only males in their offspring. What would cause the female population to begin to decline rapidly, there are no more offspring or females available to breed.
In a few years, the female mosquito population will be completely reduced, thus reducing deaths from malaria by a large percentage. Although it is a technology that in theory is obvious, the genetic modification in mosquitoes so that the young are only males was not possible until now.
