Most Americans think of mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, and dengue as problems that affect people in other countries, not their own. Until recently, they would have been largely correct: malaria and yellow fever were eliminated in the United States in the twentieth century, and dengue had become extremely rare. But as temperatures have risen and mosquitoes have developed resistance to pesticides, these diseases have become a growing problem again. In 2024, the country reported almost 4,000 cases of dengue, a 360 percent increase over the average of 830 per year over the previous decade; Florida, California, and Texas all saw locally acquired transmission; and Puerto Rico declared dengue a public health emergency. Ten locally acquired malaria cases were reported nationwide in 2023, the first reported in twenty years.
But we don’t have to accept this threat. We have new ways to wipe out mosquito-borne diseases with minimal environmental cost. The United States is sufficiently well-resourced, and its disease-carrying mosquito population sufficiently small, that it can stamp out this problem entirely within its own borders. The reason we haven’t is that the technology has spent fifteen years in regulatory limbo.
Genetic engineering can suppress mosquitoes: researchers insert a gene into male mosquitoes that means their offspring will not survive, and then release them into the wild, where they mate with females, prevent those females having any surviving offspring, and collapse local populations. In 2000, biologists at the University of Oxford demonstrated that this idea could work in fruit flies. The scientists then formed a company, Oxitec, which engineered the same gene into male Aedes aegypti. Sustained releases cut a wild Aedes aegypti population in the Cayman Islands by 80 percent, and in a field trial in Juazeiro, Brazil by about 95 percent. The company submitted its data to seek approval in the United States in 2010, but it has been slow going.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing