Can we end Dengue Fever by altering mosquitoes?

by Alanna Shaikh · 2009-01-01 21:28:00 UTC
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Dengue fever is a tropical virus, spread by infection-carrying mosquitoes. It’s a nasty debilitating sickness that goes after kids. It has so far been limited, as it needs a warm climate, but global warming has been expanding the dengue habitat. We've seen a steady expansion of dengue's territory since the 1980s, and a 30-fold increase in cases of dengue over the last 50 years. It has no vaccine, and no treatment beyond intravenous hydration. It kills 5% of the people it infects, and 40% of those who go untreated. Dengue is especially fatal to children under 15 years old.

So far, all attempts to develop drugs to fight Dengue have failed. Efforts have focused on developing drugs which target certain parts of the Dengue virus, killing it. They may well see success, but it will take a long time before we’ve got drugs that work.

Since Dengue is mosquito-borne, the other way to fight it is to go after the mosquitoes. Researchers in Australia are doing exactly that. They have cultured bacteria in order to inject them into mosquitoes. The bacteria then shorten the mosquitoes’ lives. A normal mosquito lives for a month; these bacteria-infected mosquitoes only live for two weeks.

And why does the mosquito’s life span matter? Because the Dengue virus takes its time maturing, and it is only infectious at the end of its cycle. Two weeks isn’t long enough for the Dengue virus to do its thing. So the mosquitoes can fly around biting everyone they want (unfortunately) and play their role in the eco-system (food for bats and frogs, mostly) but still refrain from spreading Dengue fever around. That’s pretty nifty.

If the thought of getting rid of Dengue wasn’t cool enough, here is an even better thought: malaria has a complicated life-cycle that lasts 10-18 days in the mosquito. Shorter-lived mosquitoes might well reduce the spread of malaria as well as Dengue.

If you want to do something personally to fight Dengue, you can sign up at the World Community Grid, and donate your computer’s excess computing time to developing drugs to kill the Dengue virus.

(photo credit: Gerald Yuvallos)

Alanna Shaikh
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