Two stories:
First - the concept. From phys.org:
Brazil mutant mosquitoes to breed out diseases
Scientists in Brazil are preparing to release millions of factory-bred mosquitoes in an attempt to wipe out their distant cousins that carry tropical diseases. The insects' method: have sex and then die.
British firm Oxitec says its genetically modified mosquitoes will swarm in among ordinary species such as Aedes aegypti, the insect that carries feared diseases such as Zika, dengue, yellow fever and chikungunya.
They will mate with the females of the ordinary mosquitoes, spawning babies with a genetically inbuilt flaw that causes them to die quickly.
With their work done, the modified father mosquitoes will then give up the ghost themselves—as they are genetically programmed to do.
Nice idea but... From the New York Post:
Plan to kill off mosquitoes backfires, spawning mutant hybrid insects
In what sounds like the plot to a Syfy channel original movie, a plan to curb a mosquito population has backfired spectacularly, making the disease-carriers even more resilient to pest-control measures.
The plan involved genetically altering mosquitoes in Brazil so their babies would die instantly, reported Futurism.
And what actually happened?
For a time, the plan seemed to be going swimmingly. The genetically-modified mosquitoes bred with their wild counterparts, causing a dip in the wild population.
Unfortunately, the numbers came roaring back just 18 months later.
Researchers think that the wild female mosquitoes may have grown wise to the measure and began avoiding the genetically modified males, reported New Atlas.
And if that wasn’t Jurassic Park enough, the wild mosquitoes could have developed a resiliency to the measure, making their population even harder to quash. Now, the region has been left with a huge population of hybrids (combinations of the Brazilian native mosquitoes and the Cuban and Mexican breeds that were genetically altered in the lab) — an outcome that could make the entire population more resistant to the original mosquito control measures.
“The claim was that genes from the release strain would not get into the general population because offspring would die,” Yale researcher Jeffrey Powell, one of the authors of the study, told New Atlas. “That obviously was not what happened.”
Talk about unintended consequences. Time to bring back DDT. Yes, it is bad for the environment and caused problems with bird shells but at that time, we were marinating in it. Carefully used, it would greatly minimize our worst pest with little or no environmental problems.
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