Conservationists are releasing mosquitoes into Hawaii to fight malaria

“Conservationists are releasing Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes in Hawaii to control the spread of avian malaria, which has devastated local bird populations,” reports The Doomslayer.

Vox explains:

For more than a year now, a group of environmental organizations have been dropping biodegradable containers of mosquitoes into honeycreeper habitats on Maui and Kauai from helicopters. Now they’re starting to do it with giant drones. The containers fall to the ground without a top, and when they land the insects escape into the forest.

Critically, these are not your typical mosquitoes. They’re all males, which don’t bite, that have been reared in a lab. More importantly, they contain a strain of bacteria called wolbachia that interferes with reproduction: When those males mate with females in the area, their eggs fail to hatch. (That’s thanks to a bit of biology magic, referred to as the incompatible insect technique, or IIT.)

The idea is to continually release these special males into honeycreeper habitat where malaria is spreading as a way to erode the population of biting mosquitoes — and thus suppress the spread of disease. The approach has little ecological downside, said Chris Farmer, Hawaii program director at American Bird Conservancy, a conservation group that’s leading the drone effort. Mosquitoes are not native, so local ecosystems and species don’t rely on them.

Brazil has similarly released millions of bacteria-infested mosquitos to fight another tropic disease, dengue fever.  2021 study found such bacteria-infested mosquitoes produced a 69% decrease in dengue fever, as well as a 56% and 37% decrease in the incidence of chikungunya and Zika, two other mosquito-borne diseases.

Such mosquitoes, infested with Wolbachia bacteria, are also being bred to fight dengue fever in Honduras, in hopes of replacing mosquitoes that spread dengue fever, with a strain of mosquitoes that doesn’t spread the disease.

Dengue fever — a tropical disease so painful it is also known as “breakbone fever” — has spread into parts of Florida, Texas, and Arizona. In 2023, there were 11 cases of locally-acquired dengue fever in Florida. It could become much more widespread in the U.S. in the future.

Scientists recently came up with an “inverse vaccine” that has shown it can treat auto-immune diseases in a lab setting, so doctors might be able to use it to reverse multiple sclerosis. Note, however, that the FDA can take many years to approve life-saving drugs and medical devices.

A virus is being used to cure deafness in new gene therapy. Researchers also discovered that a plant virus could be used to save crops from root-eating pests.