GM MOSQUITOES TO BE UNLEASHED IN FLORIDA, TEXAS TO STOP DENGUE

Millions of genetically-engineered (GE) male mosquitoes may soon be unleashed in Texas and Florida to exterminate wild ones blamed for hundreds of thousands of dengue fever cases annually, with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approving the experiment while residents condemn it.

Writing for OneZero, a publication of the online Medium, Drew Costley said in his article “Genetically-Engineered Mosquitoes Could Soon Be Unleashed in the US” released on May 6, 2020 that EPA gave Oxitec, a British company that specializes in GE insects, the permit to experiment with using modified mosquitoes to prevent the spread of the Zika virus and dengue fever. If approved by state and local authorities, Oxitec will be the first entity to be allowed to release GE mosquitoes in the US.

Nearly 4 billion people worldwide are at risk of contracting dengue fever, a study conducted in 2012 showed and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 22,000 people die of a severe version of the disease every year. In 2016, thousands of infants in Brazil were born with birth defects linked to Zika, and more than 40,000 people in the US and its territories were infected with the disease. Last year, researchers projected in Nature Microbiology that by 2050, nearly half the world’s population will be at risk of contracting diseases like these — caused by microbes called arboviruses — due to climate change and urbanization. An increasingly warm and more densely populated planet will be more hospitable to the mosquito species that spread the disease, called Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus.

Oxitec’s mosquitoes are males modified with a gene that gets passed down when they mate with females in the wild. The gene causes the female offspring to die. Since female mosquitoes are the ones that bite, they’re the only ones that pass along disease to humans. Male mosquitoes don’t bite, so the EPA and Oxitec say the designer mosquitoes don’t pose a threat to humans. However, Ed Russo, president of the Florida Keys Environmental Coalition said “they don’t know what the collateral impacts will be on our environment” and cited a 2019 report by Yale University and other Brazilian schools that claimed Oxitec mosquitoes released in Brazil passed on their genetic modifications to another generation of mosquitoes, creating a new hybrid variant of Aedes aegypti.