Singapore is a tiny Southeast Asian island nation of about 6 million people. Last year, a dengue outbreak in Singapore led to about 26,000 people getting affected by the deadly virus.
The factors that contribute to this are the unseasonably wet weather and Covid-19 lockdowns that had led to the stalling of construction, thereby leading to an increase in stagnant water at these construction sites in Singapore.
In order to avoid another outbreak of dengue, the scientists came up with a brilliant and novel technique involving the Wolbachia bacteria. This bacteria is capable of infecting a number of isopod species, spiders, mites, and many parasitic worms, including those causing river blindness and elephantiasis in humans, as well as heartworms in dogs.
The idea of this initiative was to infect a number of male Aedes Aegypti mosquitoes and make them a carrier of this bacteria, such that when these male mosquitoes mate with female mosquitoes, they will also infect the females.
The reason for infecting the males with the bacteria rather than directly injecting the females was that each male mosquito would mate with several female mosquitoes and it would be irrelevant to infect each and every female as well. The novel idea was that only female mosquitoes bite humans and male dengue mosquitoes do not bite humans. After mating, the females which didn’t originally carry the bacteria would not be able to reproduce and none of the resultant eggs would hatch.
Their aim was to produce 5 million Wolbachia-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquitoes a week to counter the surge in dengue cases. This was a scintillating success and the results left everyone flabbergasted.
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