Posts Tagged ‘Genetic engineering’

Mutant Mosquitoes

December 7, 2012

This story I read at The Daily Mail sounds like it could be the beginning of a really bad horror movie.

English: Mosquito on finger This image is part...

English: Mosquito on finger This image is part of a set of UF/IFAS images specifically released for Creative Commons usage. Please do not alter or delete attribution watermark. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Hundreds of thousands of genetically modified mosquitoes are awaiting federal approval for release into the Florida Keys as part of an experiment aimed at reducing the risk of dengue fever.

Mosquito control officials have requested the Food and Drug Administration’s sign off on the experiment that would be the first of its kind in the U.S.

Some residents of the tourist town of Key West worry though on how much research has been done to determine the risks of releasing genetically modified mosquitoes on the Keys’ fragile ecosystem.




English: Stegomyia aegypti (formerly Aedes aeg...

English: Stegomyia aegypti (formerly Aedes aegypti) mosquito biting a human. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

‘The science of it, I think, looks fine. It’s straight from setting up experiments and collecting data,’ said Michael Doyle, pointing to research Oxitec has had published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. He inherited the project when he took the lead at the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District in mid-2011.


Dengue fever is a viral disease that inflicts severe flu-like symptoms — the joint pain is so severe its nickname is ‘breakbone fever.’ It isn’t fatal but victims are then susceptible at subsequent exposures to dengue hemorrhagic fever, which can be.

‘It’s very uncomfortable. You ache all over, you have a terrible fever,’ said Joel Biddle, a Key West resident whose dengue fever symptoms lasted more than a week in 2009.





‘Unfortunately, control of Aedes aegypti is a never-ending job,’ said Larry Hriber, the mosquito control district’s research director.


What happens next is that the genetic modifications cause the mosquitoes to grow to giant size, or there mosquitoes turn out to be fertile and their female descendants bite human and turn them into weird mosquito creatures, or something. Well if they could make a bad movie about giant killer rabbits why not one about giant killer mosquitoes?

The truth is that mosquitoes are responsible for more human fatalities than any other animal by carrying diseases like malaria and dengue fever. It really wouldn’t bother me in the least if the whole mosquito family were made extinct. That, would of course, be bad for various ecosystems since bats and other animals feed on them, but still I don’t like mosquitoes at all.


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