Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: Mosquitoes are often referred to as the deadliest animals on Earth because of the devastating pathogens they are able to transmit when females bite and then feed on blood from human hosts (male mosquitoes don’t bite). In 2015 alone there were an estimated 212 million cases of malaria, resulting in 429,000 deaths (1). Approximately one-third of Earth’s population is considered at risk for infection by the dengue virus (2). Furthermore, the rapid emergence and global spread of mosquito-borne viruses, such as West Nile, Zika, and chikungunya, are of increasing public health concern (3, 4). Because effective vaccines and drug therapies are not available for the majority of these mosquito-borne pathogens, efforts to reduce disease transmission have traditionally focused on suppressing or eliminating the mosquito vector, usually by reducing larval habitats (source reduction) or applying insecticides. However, the effectiveness of these traditional approaches is limited by the proliferation of man-made habitats (e.g., discarded tires and cisterns), the rapid geographic spread of vector species associated with human commerce and travel, and the evolution of insecticide resistance. Novel approaches to control are desperately needed. Recently, a variety of exciting strategies to disrupt disease transmission have emerged based on genetic modification of vectors or infection of vectors with bacterial symbionts (5, 6). These strategies seek to either suppress vector populations to sufficiently low numbers that pathogen transmission cannot be sustained (population suppression), or to introduce and spread genetic modifications or bacterial symbiont infections through natural populations so the mosquitoes are incapable of transmitting pathogens (population replacement). Current population replacement strategies focus on preventing the mosquito from transmitting a pathogen once it has already taken a bite and ingested blood. In PNAS, Bradshaw et al. (7) establish the foundation of an intriguing alternative approach based on the potent logic that mosquitoes that don’t …
[↵][1]1Email: paa9{at}georgetown.edu.
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Author: Peter A. Armbruster
Institution: Georgetown University
Language: English
Subfield: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Funder: National Institutes of Health
OpenAlex ID: W2782801507