A pilot project for Florida wetlands was approved by the government agency EPA in May this year. Its aim is to test in real conditions whether it is possible to use genetically improved mosquitoes to reduce their number in nature. The tropical mosquito species is a carrier of a number of deadly diseases, such as yellow fever, zika, dengue fever or arbovirus chikungunya.
Researchers have genetically created mosquitoes called OX5034 for this purpose. They have made several changes to their DNA to ensure that they produce only female offspring that die in the larval stage — that is, they never grow to size when they are sucking blood and transmitting disease.
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Mosquitoes were created in laboratories by the British, American-owned company Oxitec. She has already received permission to use them at another location, in Harris County, Texas.
The EPA has approved for several years, assessing the impact on both humans and nature. “This is a great development because our work is the result of more than a decade of groundbreaking research by hundreds of amazing people from many countries around the world. Everyone wants to protect our communities from zika, dengue, yellow fever and other mosquito-borne diseases, ”said Oxitec Director Gray Frandsen in a press release.
“Experiment in the spirit of Jurassic Park”
But not everyone considers him great. “With the urgent crisis facing our nation and the state of Florida – coronavirus pandemics, racial injustice, climate change – our authorities have used taxpayer dollars to conduct an experiment in the spirit of Jurassic Park,” criticizes Jaydee Hanson, director of International Center for Technology Assessment and Center for Food Safety.
“What could go wrong? We don’t know because the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has illegally refused to analyze environmental risks, “he added.
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Why such a risk?
However, the project, which sounds too risky to its critics, has already been approved by seven US government agencies. It is a response to the situation ten years ago, when local cases of dengue fever appeared in Florida – and the authorities were unable to resolve the situation using classic best practices such as insecticides.
Oxitec has already tested these genetically modified mosquitoes in the “field,” in the Cayman Islands, Panama, and Brazil — everything, according to the company, worked great.
The authors of the project are not afraid to disrupt the food chain in Florida; The tropical mosquito makes up only about one percent of all mosquitoes in this environment.
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