Friday, May 18th 2007

STANFORD, Calif., May 18 (AScribe Newswire) — Releasing genetically modified male mosquitoes could eliminate the danger of dengue fever and other mosquito-borne diseases within a year in communities of up to a million people, according to research released this week.

Health professionals have tried different techniques to control disease-bearing mosquitoes, including a process called Released Insect with a Dominant Lethal, or RIDL, that uses genetically-modified male mosquitoes who produce offspring that die shortly before or after birth.

“The RIDL approach is an alternative that is also environmentally-benign,” said Lawrence M. Wein, the Paul E. Holden Professor of Management Science at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, one of the authors of a paper published today by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

RIDL mosquitoes have proven more effective than insects that are irradiated to make them sterile, he added, because the genetically-modified male insects are more physically fit to compete with the mosquitoes in the wild than those that have been subjected to radiation.

However, scientists have had difficulty trying to figure out the effectiveness of such campaigns and to determine the right proportion of altered insects necessary to have an impact on infected mosquito populations.

Wein and his co-researchers developed a mathematical model that predicts the effectiveness of RIDL eradication campaigns.

Their paper, “Analyzing the Control of Mosquito-borne Diseases by a Dominant Lethal Genetic System,” was authored by Michael P. Atkinson and Zheng Su of Stanford’s Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering, Nina Alphey and Luke Alphey of the University of Oxford, Paul G. Coleman of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Wein.

Mosquito-born diseases, such as dengue fever, are a major health problem in many countries, especially in the developing world. There is no licensed vaccine for dengue which affects up to 100 million people each year. Between 250,000 and 500,000 potentially fatal cases are reported annually.

One of the known dengue-causing types of mosquitoes is endemic in the southeastern United States. The recent spread of the West Nile virus has raised concerns that the United States may be vulnerable to other serious outbreaks of mosquito-born dis

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