
“Brazil has opened the world’s largest Wolbachia-infected mosquito factory after field trials saw the insects slash” the rate of diseases like “dengue, Zika, and chikungunya,” reports The Doomslayer.
The factory “officially launched this week to combat mosquito-borne diseases,” explains the World Mosquito Program:
It will dramatically expand access across Brazil to Wolbachia mosquitoes, a nature-based disease control method that has significantly reduced the incidence of dengue, Zika, and Chikungunya, in Rio de Janeiro and Niterói since the method was first deployed in those cities in 2014.
The major biofactory, based in Curitiba, is the result of a joint venture between the World Mosquito Program (WMP), Fiocruz, and the Institute of Molecular Biology of Paraná (IBMP).
The formal partnership builds on years of collaboration between WMP and Fiocruz, which has helped protect more than five million Brazilians across eight cities using WMP’s innovative Wolbachia technology over the past decade. This number is expected to reach more than 140 million people across 40 municipalities in the coming years, as the Ministry of Health incorporates Wolbachia as one of its national strategies for combatting mosquito-borne diseases.
“The biofactory will have the capacity to produce 100 million mosquito eggs per week,” says Luciano Moreira, CEO of Wolbito do Brasil, who is responsible for bringing the method to Brazil. The facility will initially be capable of producing about five billion mosquito eggs annually.
“Our goal is to significantly reduce the number of arbovirus cases in the country. In ten years, we will have protected more than half of the Brazilian population.”
NPR adds:
Inside a small building in eastern Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Cátia Cabral holds up a jar filled with what looks like fine black pepper. But this ain’t pepper. Each granule is actually a tiny mosquito egg.
Cabral estimates this container holds some half a million eggs.
Next door, untold numbers of tiny larvae wriggle in bins filled with water. “It’s like it’s the mosquito nursery room,” she says through an interpreter.
In another large room, mesh cages teem with mosquitoes that feast on small bags of blood.
Cabral is a biologist at the nonprofit World Mosquito Program who supervises this place, which amounts to a finely tuned, high tech bug-making factory where mosquitoes are bred by the millions.
The thought of all these mosquitoes might make one’s skin crawl. But Cabral thinks of them as her babies, and she says these insects deserve more praise than loathing. That’s because they’ve been engineered to shut down the transmission of the very diseases they usually carry and spread.
And it’s why the Brazilian government has made a massive investment to create and deploy this tiny winged armada across the country — to join their other national efforts to combat mosquito-borne diseases.
The mosquitoes are being used to fight dengue fever, a tropical disease so painful it is also known as “breakbone fever.” Denque 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.
Conservationists are also releasing Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes into Hawaii to fight avian malaria, which devastated local bird populations.
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.