Laura Carretero Santos, Parasitology, 3rd year of Pharmacy and Biotechnology.
The 1st of July of 2019, the consortium proceeded with a small-scale release of sterile male mosquitoes in Bana, Burkina Faso. Why and how would they do this?
Target Malaria is a project whose goal is to reduce the population of Anopheles females in order to diminish the transmission of malaria, even if there is a treatment, more than 430 000 people died in 2018 because of this disease, approximately a 70% of them were children younger than 5 years old. In 2016 a child died of malaria every 2 minutes.
In a recent study, they modeled a “driving-Y chromosome” that has been genetically modified so that the male mosquitoes that carry the mutation produce mainly male offspring (that also carry the modification). As only females bite, the spread of this Y-chromosome as the generations of mosquitoes go on, will result in less Anopheles females to transmit the disease, and few mosquitoes overall. This technology is still under development and it targets the most common malaria mosquitoes of sub-Saharan Africa.
Target Malaria team has been working since 2012 to reach a goal that each day is closer. The 1st of July, they proceeded with a small-scale release of sterile male mosquitoes. They used a technique known as “mark-release-recapture”. They marked their sterile male mosquitoes with coloured powder, then they were liberated in a pre-identified area within Bana’s village. After this, they proceeded with the recapture of the individuals.
You can see how they did it in tthis video, from a previous experiment in March, 2018.
The models Target Malaria designed predict the elimination of malaria mosquitoes in some areas and the reduction of their population in others (it depends mainly on seasonality, population elimination is more likely in regions with mild dry seasons). The continual introduction of these mosquitoes into a small number of human settlements per year may be enough to significantly reduce the number of malaria-transmitting mosquitoes.
The Consortium has a strong Ethics Advisory Committee in place that is in charge of all ethical issues and explains to the population the procedures and experiments they make. They only take a step forward in this investigation when they have the acceptance of Bana’s population.
The commission for the eradication of malarial disease of the medical journal “The Lancet” published a report the 8th of September of 2019 that claims that malaria can be eradicated by 2050, in spite of the skepticism from the World Health Organization.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(19)31139-0 Published: September 08, 2019
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