Now our neighbour wants to mess with GM Mosquitos to combat the
Aedes Mosquito.... I hope it's not creating a monster and creating
new problems -_-"
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The days of the Aedes mosquitoes appear to be numbered, thanks
to the efforts of a British bio-tech company and Malaysia's
Institute of Medical Research, writes P. SELVARANI.
MILLIONS of genetically modified (GM) "warrior" Aedes mosquitoes
will soon be released into the fishing village of Pulau Ketam off
Selangor as part of international field trials to fight the dengue
scourge.
The GM male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which carry killer genes,
will be released into the wild to eliminate the Aedes mosquito
population which spreads dengue fever.
The field trials will be undertaken by the Health Ministry's
Institute of Medical Research (IMR) in collaboration with
British-based Oxitec Ltd, an insect bio-tech company part-owned by
the University of Oxford.
This follows the success of confined lab trials which were
conducted under the supervision of the IMR over the past year.
<!-- start video--><!-- end video-->The field
testing is expected to be conducted on a wider scale on Pulau Ketam
at the end of the year or early next year.
The team is undertaking a baseline survey of the island, which is
reported to have a high number of the Aedes aegypti
mosquitoes.
Oxitec has advertised on its website vacancies for the Pulau Ketam
field-testing job, which includes a position for a senior
entomologist.
The field trials on the island, which is a 30-minute boat ride from
Port Klang, are expected to be carried out over a year.
Health Ministry and IMR officials did not want to comment on the
tests.
In February, Oxitec had announced that it planned to release the GM
mosquitoes in Malaysia on a large scale in three years, following
its successful trials.
Calcutta's The Telegraph newspaper had quoted Oxitec's head of
public health, Seshadri S. Vasan, as saying that the first confined
field study under the supervision of the IMR "yielded encouraging
results".
Sources said the controlled lab tests done here were the first in
the world and was a breakthrough in the fight against dengue, which
has grown to alarming proportions across the globe in recent
years.
The technique involves releasing GM male Aedes mosquitoes to mate
with the female Aedes mosquito. The lethal genes cause the larvae
to die.
(Only a female mosquito can transmit the disease-causing germ
because it, and not the male mosquito, has a proboscis that is
capable of piercing the human skin.)
The Aedes mosquito is the main vector for dengue and chikungunya
fever and conventional methods such as fogging have been
ineffective in controlling the spread of these diseases.
However, environmental non-governmental organisations fear that
releasing these GM mosquitoes in the wild may affect the ecosystem
and cause further damage.
Gurmit Singh, the chairman of the Centre for Environment,
Technology and Development, said: "Like all GM organisms, once they
have been released in the wild, how do you prevent them from
interacting with other insects and producing mutants which may be
worse than the Aedes mos-quito?"
It is learnt that if the Pulau Ketam field trials prove successful,
the next step would be to introduce the killer mosquitoes in bigger
towns which have a high incidence of dengue.
The Telegraph had also reported that the sterile insect technique
(SIT), which involves releasing millions of sterile male insects
over a wide area to mate with the native female ones, had been
around for decades.
It said the conventional sterilisation programmes using radiation
or chemical treatment to foster sterility, which were tried on
mosquitoes as well, did not work.
Irradiation rendered these mosquitoes so sickly and unattractive
that their female counterparts shunned them for the wild
ones.
On the other hand, mosquitoes subjected to Oxitec's proprietary
technique, called RIDL-SIT, remained healthy and attractive enough
to woo the native female insects.
This was proved in independent case studies in Oxford and France
and in contained semi-field trials in Malaysia.
Vasan was quoted as saying that the latest study in Malaysia showed
that "up to 50 per cent of the wild type female mosquitoes chose to
mate with Oxitec's RIDL male mosquitoes".
The paper added that Oxitec had received regulatory and import
permits for confined evaluation in the US, France and Malaysia.
Source: http://www.nst.com.my/Sunday/National/2224853/Article/index_html
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Read more about Oxitec here:
http://www.oxitec.com/public-health.htm
