Sydney, Dec 25 (Inditop.com) Wolbachia, a bacterium from fruit flies, makes mosquitoes more resistant to infection by viruses, including those triggering dengue fever and Chikungunya, says a new research.
Previous studies had shown that Wolbachia can halve the lives of disease-carrying mosquitoes.
Once infected with Wolbachia, Aedes aegypti mosquitoes also become less suitable hosts for a form of malaria parasite that infects birds, said Scott O’Neill of The University of Queensland. The mosquitoes under study aren’t natural carriers of human malaria.
“This might be very powerful in reducing pathogen transmission by Aedes aegypti to humans, particularly for dengue and Chikungunya,” O’Neill said.
There is no vaccine or cure for dengue fever, which is a painful and debilitating disease suffered by some 50 million people worldwide every year.
Dengue haemorrhagic fever, the more severe form of the disease, kills more than 40,000 people annually.
Chikungunya usually isn’t fatal, but can cause symptoms similar to dengue. Human epidemics of Chikungunya have been cited in Africa, Asia and more recently in Europe, according to the Centres for Disease Control (CDC).
Wolbachia is already rampant in nature; the bacterium is estimated to infect up to 60 percent of all insect species.
“We are currently conducting a series of experiments in contained outdoor greenhouse settings that are examining the ability of the Wolbachia infection to spread into natural mosquito populations,” he said.
“If these prove successful, we hope to move to open field testing within the next one to two years.”
These findings were published in the Thursday issue of Cell.
