You don’t want to get dengue fever from the bite of an infected mosquito. The disease is also called breakbone fever for the painful joint aches. It has a quite low fatality rate but a significant morbidity rate (lost time for the sufferer being able-bodied).
Vaccines are difficult to create, given that there are four strains of dengue and getting immune against one can make infection by another strain more serious. A defense being deployed is breeding hundreds of millions of mosquitos as at Curitiba, Brazil, heart of dengue country. You heard right, releasing huge masses of mosquitoes… with a difference.
The new insects are infected with a bacterium of the genus Wohlbachia discovered in 1924 by, who else, two German scientists, Wohlbach and Hertig. They were working with fruit flies. The bacterium is passed to all offspring of the female mosquito. It ramps up the mosquito’s immune defense against itself being infected with dengue, as well as other nasty diseases that include Chikungunya fever.
Massive releases of these altered mosquitoes leads to Wohlbachia-infected ones becoming dominant. The system has worked well in Brazil, Colombia, and Indonesia. We can thanknot only the mosquito entomologists but also those who studied the simple fruit flies. The fruit fly work also informs research on human birth defects!
This has been an outreach activity of the Las Cruces Academy, viewable at GreatSchools.org
Source: Nature, 11 Sept. 2025, pp. 289-291.
Image: Same
