Attacking Malaria with Spermless Mosquitoes

Niko A. -- Malaria is a deadly disease that can kill a full-grown man in less then a few hours after first showing signs of symptoms. The possibly fatal disease is caused by one of our most annoying pests… mosquitoes. In the tropics mosquito’s kill about one million people a year - small bug, big bite. Scientists have been trying to eliminate the infected mosquitoes with insecticides but the bugs became immune too fast so scientists had to try a different approach. The only mosquito that actually bite you are pregnant female mosquitoes so the researchers experimented with “silencing” some male mosquitoes gene that is required for making healthy sperm cells. The researchers then bred them with some female mosquitoes so she laid un-fertilized eggs. After mating once mosquitoes never mate again and because the male is just as competent at attracting females this practice of turning off the males ability to produce offspring is a big success.  Meaning 100 fewer mosquitoes to give you malaria. Even if this process takes too much time outside of the lab it’s another milestone in trying to stop the 5^th cause of death from disease worldwide, malaria.

            This article was extremely interesting to me because I didn’t know many of the things they explained in it, for example I didn’t know that our technology was sophisticated enough to let us control the genes of other organisms. Another interesting fact in this article was that only one animal carries malaria, the mosquito.  I was always aware that they carried the disease but I always figured that there were other animal carriers as well. I thought that this article was very helpful not so much for me but for someone having to deal with the fear of malaria because it might give them hope that the disease wasn’t a permanent thing. After reading this article I felt very grateful for having a home in a place that wasn’t plagued by a disease of some sort because a lot of people aren’t that lucky. I was also thankful that people research this kind of thing because if it weren’t for them we wouldn’t know a lot of the biologic facts we know.  For example, I learned that mosquitoes actually eat plants, only when a female is pregnant do they go for blood. I thought it was very interesting that female mosquitoes would be tricked by a male mosquito who didn’t have healthy sperm because it seems like there would be other things affected in turning off a gene but I guess that our technology if far enough along so we can avoid that kind of thing. I found that this article was very appealing to me due to its interesting facts and the subject matter itself.

Link:  Attacking Malaria with Spermless Mosquitoes  (includes video)