Defeating Malaria with both High- and Low-Tech opens with a high-tech solution:
The worst mosquito-borne disease, malaria, infects about 400 million people worldwide each year (90 percent in sub-Saharan Africa) and kills about 1.3 million of them.So it’s great that scientists at the Malaria Research Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland have genetically built a better mosquito, which is to say that it still bites and leaves an itchy welt but cannot spread malaria. The idea is that large numbers of engineered mosquitoes would be released in malaria-ridden areas so they could interbreed with wild ones. Over time more and more of the mosquito population would carry the new trait.
This is not a new concept. Various types of harmful male insects are irradiated to make them sterile, and then released to interbreed with fertile bugs and thereby reduce the overall population. The problem with sterilization, though, is that it often weakens the insect and gives fertile wild competitors the advantage in breeding.
But these biotech mosquitoes actually have a breeding advantage. Mosquitoes infected with the malaria parasite, Plasmodium, don’t die from it but are weakened. The engineered ones, being immune, can drink their natural cousins under the table. “When fed on Plasmodium-infected blood, the transgenic malaria-resistant mosquitoes had a significant fitness advantage over wild-type,” the researchers remarked in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.