Some Florida Keys residents are worried about plans to release more than 750 million genetically modified mosquitoes in the region to fight disease.
The Florida Keys’ Mosquito Control District on Tuesday gave final approval to the plan, which will be implemented in 2021 and 2022.
The transgenic insects, classified as OX5034, have been adapted to kill the population of Aedes aegypti, a mosquito known to carry Zika, malaria, dengue, yellow fever and other diseases.
Residents and local wildlife groups, however, are worried that the ‘Jurrasic Park Experiment’ could just introduce a new breed of mosquito.
State officials have tried to calm their fears, and stated the transgenic bugs will provide a safer, cheaper alternative to spraying the Aedes aegypti with insecticides.
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A close-up of an Aedes aegypti on human skin. On Tuesday, the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District gave final approval to a plan to release more than 750 million genetically modified versions of the insect to help reduce the number in the Keys.
The mosquitoes are all male, altered so that every female offspring they produce dies in the larval stage well before they are large enough to bite and spread disease.
Only female mosquitoes bite for blood, so they have to follow their eggs. Male offspring would go along with the ‘defective’ gene.
Dengue fever results in 390 million infections per year, according to the World Health Organization, with a more than 30-fold increase in reported cases over the last 50 years.
The disease causes high fever, severe headaches and joint pain and can lead to fatal complications – it also kills 25,000 people every year.
A woman outside the Florida Mosquito Control District Office protests the use of transgenic mosquitoes. Critics say the altered insects would actually make generations of hearty hybrid mosquitoes more resistant to pesticides
The transgenic mosquitoes, all male, are designed to kill female offspring that would die as larvae, long before they can bite and spread Zika, dengue, yellow fever and other pathogens. Only female mosquitoes bite blood, which they have to feed their eggs
The Florida Keys reported major outbreaks of dengue in 2009 and 2010, with smaller reports this year.
But residents and environmental groups say not enough is known about these transgenic mosquitoes.
They are worried that the program might just introduce a new breed of mosquito that is more resistant to insecticides.
Jaydee Hanson of the International Center for Technology Assessment accused the EPA, which gave the project the thumbs up in May, of failing to take the risks seriously.
“With all the urgent crises facing our nation and the state of Florida – the COVID-19 pandemic, racial injustice, climate change – the administration has used tax dollars and government funds for an experiment at Jurassic Park,” Hanson said in a statement on Wednesday .
Officials hope the modified mosquitoes can provide a safer, cheaper alternative to spraying the Aedes Egyptians with insecticides. Neither the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District nor Oxitec has publicly announced exactly when or where the releases will take place
‘What could possibly go wrong? We do not know. ‘
In 2016, voters in Key Haven, Florida, rejected a proposal to release the genetically modified mosquito in their city.
More than 230,000 people have signed a Change.org petition against the current plan.
Officials hope the transgenic bugs will provide a safer, cheaper alternative to spraying the Aedes Egypt with insecticides.
Neither the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District nor Oxitec has publicly announced exactly when or where the releases will take place.
The transgenic Aedes aegypti has also been approved for release in Harris County, Texas next year.
These mark the first time that genetically modified mosquitoes will be used in the US. But scientists monitoring a similar effort in Brazil say it has backfired.
Researchers from Yale University investigated the influence of Oxitec’s transgenic mosquitoes in Jacobina, a popular ecotourism destination.
A woman in Brazil breastfeeds her son in a bed protected by a mosquito net. Yale scientists say Oxitec transgenic mosquitoes in the country have released generations of harder hybrid insects
In a study published last year in Nature magazine Scientific Reports, they found ‘clear evidence’ that the genetically modified mosquitoes gave rise to new generations of harder, hybrid insects.
“The claim was that genes from the release strain would not be passed on to the general population because offspring would die,” said senior author Jeffrey Powell, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at Yale. “That was apparently not what happened.”
Oxitec dismissed the study as’ false, misleading and speculative ‘and said it had’ successfully provided significant repression of the wild Aedes-Egypt in Brazil. ‘
Originally in Africa, Aedes aegypti can now be found in tropical and subtropical regions around the world.
They have white markings on their legs and a mark in the form of a lyre on the upper surface of their thorax.
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