Skip to main content

In Brazil, dodging Dengue fever may mean mutant mosquitos

turning mosquitos male brazilian genetically modified 3
Image used with permission by copyright holder
The world is in the midst of an outbreak.

Not quite the devastating plagues depicted in “The Walking Dead” or “World War Z,” but one that spreads just as easily through the chomp of an infected beast: Dengue fever.

The illness is spread by mosquitos, which bite and draw blood from previously infected humans, then pay it forward upon biting another human. The ensuing sickness involves flu-like symptoms, severe headache, pain behind the eyes, severe muscles, bones and joints aches, and rashes.

More than 100 countries have felt the effects of Dengue fever, including Brazil, host of the FIFA World Cup 2014. Futbol fans are currently spread across cities like Recife, Salvador, Natal and other highly vulnerable areas of Northern Brazil. (On the plus side, the southern regions are seasonly safer.) That’s a lot of potential carriers in contact with a lot of mosquitoes eager to snack, meaning the soccer extravaganza carries serious potential to further spread the fever.

Which is where mutant mosquitos may save the day.

The mosquitos are essentially born to die – quickly, before they can spread Dengue fever.

Oxitec, a British biotech company, has worked in conjunction with Brazilian biotech company Moscamed to manufacture a breed of genetically modified mosquitoes designed to fight the fever. Thanks to a small tweak of their DNA, the mosquitos are essentially born to die – quickly, before they can spread Dengue fever.

“Each Oxitec male mosquito carries two copies of the lethal gene, of which one will always be inherited by each of the offspring,” Oxitec CEO Hadyn Parry explains. “The gene itself is neither allergenic nor toxic. Instead, it acts as a switch to control the activity of other genes, so it ties up some of the cell’s essential machinery and disrupts its normal function. As a result, the modified mosquitoes can’t develop properly and die before becoming adults.”

While Oxitec wasn’t able to use the mosquitos in Brazil for the World Cup, the company hopes to unleash them in time for the 2016 Summer Olympics in the same country, when it will once again play host to millions of visitors from across the globe.

So how does one go about Frankenstein-ing skeeters? It begins with a stable and contained population of “pest species” raised in a lab. From there, individual eggs are micro-injected with DNA, and once the mosquitoes are born, they’re examined and tested to select a strain most effective to serve as an unknowing soldier in the battle against Dengue. “The mosquito strain we use in Brazil has had over a decade of testing,” notes Parry.

But that hasn’t preventing critics from buzzing. Genewatch UK, a non-for-profit group dedicated to “investigating genetic science and technologies will impact on our food, health, agriculture, environment and society,” has disputed the effectiveness of the GM mosquitoes. In an April 2014 statement, the group declared that “no published toxicity tests to show that swallowing GM mosquitoes or being bitten by surviving GM females is safe for humans, pets and wildlife.”

“Oxitec’s ineffective and risky GM insects are a poor showcase for British exports to Brazil,” said Dr. Helen Wallace GeneWatch, UK Director. “A desperate desire to prop up British biotech and reward venture capital investors should not blind the UK and Brazilian governments to the risks of this technology.”

“We have reduced the Dengue mosquito population by over 90 percent.”

Parry denies any cause for concern. “Genewatch is a small but vocal pressure group opposed to GM technology,” he said. “We respect Helen Wallace’s viewpoint, but we don’t appreciate it when she scaremongers by raising concerns with no sound scientific or factual basis.”

According to Perry, Oxitec has been working through the “proper, scrutinized, independent, regulatory systems in each country” before implementing the mosquitos, and the results so far are good. “Each country can make its own decision based on the data – the trend here is clear as regulators in several countries have approved imports and trials and Brazil has declared this safe for commercial use.”

Assuming toxicity is truly a non-issue, what matters most is whether or not the presence of these mosquitoes equal a decrease in Dengue. Parry claims the verdict is already in.

“In every urban trial we have done we have reduced the Dengue mosquito population by over 90 percent,” he said. “This is something that is just unattainable by use of insecticides.”

For the roughly 25,000 people who die of Dengue fever every year, that means genetically modified mosquitos could literally be the difference between life and death.

Andy Kamenetzky
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Andy Kamenetzky has worked in sports media for over a decade. For nearly a decade, he has covered the Los Angeles Lakers and…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more