This is great news. Dengue was a constant problem in my home country of Malaysia, and remains a problem to this day. I still remember all the public education campaigns about it that I saw when I was young (random ads on TV about making sure there's no stagnant water, seeking medical help if you notice <symptoms>, etc), I'm very glad that there are easily implementable solutions to these problems.

As a side note, I wonder why this kind of research is not more popular in university labs of tropical countries. Malaysia, Singapore, India, etc are home to plenty of university labs that should have the expertise and motivation to do this kind of thing, but they're really dropping the ball if they're not working on it right now. Every time I read about new mosquito fighting innovations it's out of an American or European lab, far away from where it's most impactful.

Is it a problem of funding? Somehow the Malaysian government funds less mosquito disease research than the US? Political will? I would hope that the health ministries of tropical countries are willing to throw some money at the problem. Institutional knowledge? Plenty of the professors are educated in Australia/UK/US, so that can't be it. Coverage? Western media covers western labs, and don't notice when labs elsewhere do the same thing?

    > making sure there's no stagnant water[...]

This Wolbachia bacteria is really something else. It seems to have a massive set of effects on a variety of organisms, directly impacting the way they reproduce, or even the way which sex they develop into. Remarkable.

As some sort of bonus it also prevents the host from developing other viral diseases in the case of mosquitos, I guess because it's a parasite, so it's advantageous for it to do so? Wild little thing. Does a lot.

>"Computational models predict that introducing Wolbachia strains into natural populations will reduce pathogen transmission and reduce overall disease burden.[64] An example includes a life-shortening Wolbachia that can be used to control dengue virus and malaria by eliminating the older insects that contain more parasites. Promoting the survival and reproduction of younger insects lessens selection pressure for evolution of resistance.[65][66]"

>"In addition, some Wolbachia strains are able to directly reduce viral replication inside the insect. For dengue they include wAllbB and wMelPop with Aedes aegypti, wMel with Aedes albopictus.[67] and Aedes aegypti.[68]"

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolbachia]

I find these sort of things somewhat odd. Dengue is extremely unpleasant, but as the article mentions it has a 99.98% survival rate in spite of being predominantly spread in some of the most impoverished areas in the world. Wiki [1] gives even better figures than the article which yield a 99.99% survival rate, and a total hospitalization rate of 0.13%.

Unforeseen consequences are a thing, and nature can evolve in difficult to predict ways. For instance one of the big early arguments for GMO crops is that it'd enable us to reduce our overall usage of herbicides. The main modification was glyphosate resistance, and since glyphosate was otherwise highly toxic to all plants, it was thought that just a bit of it would be enough to take care of what used to require much more herbicide.

And it lived up to this promise at first. But nature responded by naturally evolving glyphosate resistant weeds, and farmers responded by just spraying more of it, and more regularly, and we're now using more herbicide/acre than ever before. In 1991 (just prior to GMO crops starting to really kick off), we were using a rate of 1.18 units of herbicide per acre. By 2000 that had declined to 1.06. "Now" (2014) we're up to 2.02 and rapidly increasing. [2]

So many things (related to interacting with nature in various forms) seem to be being done under the assumption of a stationary target, when nature is anything but.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengue_fever

[2] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5044953/

Los Angeles is doing something similar with fruit flies. [1] They're releasing infertile males, in the hopes that they outcompete males of a non-native species that could threaten the agricultural industry.

1: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/millions-of-steril...

Singapore has been doing this for years.

When they release new males they put a flyer up at our lift that says "there's gonna be tons of mosquitoes soon, don't worry, they are males and they don't bite" and shortly after, all mosquitoes are gone.

It seems to work. I'm not a fan of meddling with nature in this way, though. I have zero doubts that this will end up in some kind of unforeseen disaster.

Wolbachia is "healthy gut microbiota" but for mosquitoes.

It prevents their infection by many viruses.

Note that California has reported two cases of Dengue in people who haven't travelled outside the United States.

Currently down with dengue. Wish they'd put these good mosquitos where I live!

There's a really good Unsung Science podcast about a program related to this: https://wondery.com/shows/unsung-science/episode/12810-what-...

I'd like to see something similar done for Tick bite/Lime disease and bed bugs, they both seem to be accelerating their reach past decade or so.

What's the status on gene-drive approach to cull tail harmful insects?

So all benefits, no negatives?

  * Golden Rice
  * Unleaded gas
  * HCFCs (over CFCs)
  * etc

This is hardly the place for this kind of discussion but I can't help but comment on this.

Countless species are already going extinct all the time, both known to us and completely unknown to us, and both "naturally" and from human impact, and no one really cares.

Here's a rare case of a species that there is very good reason to deliberately get rid of, and suddenly people care and object, a lot!?

Of course there's justifiable skepticism and a long, sorry history of unintended consequences of introducing, eradicating or in any way modifying a species or its behavior, but seriously, read up on it, this is not one of those species, pretty much everyone who knows anything about it (including otherwise very environmentally minded people who as a rule would never, ever agree with deliberately eradicating anything) agrees it can be eradicated with no meaningful impact on the ecosystem. (and yes, that includes even the armchair criticism from cynical misanthropes who consider human deaths resulting from this species a good thing "because humans are bad for the environment" - while these mosquitoes do cause a lot of human deaths, the environmental "benefit" of those deaths are completely meaningless in the grand scheme of things)

Starfield companions would've frown upon this solution.

More seriously though: 10 years is a long time, this is super interesting but one would wonder if in such time other limiting dengue factors might've arose.

The 2022 mortality rate for dengue in Indonesia is 0.86%, with most of the fatalities being young kids. ~1200 people in 2022. [0]

It could be that the figures match your own as not everyone goes to a clinic when they have it - much more likely when its a bad dose. But a huge amount of people get it each year.

Ive had it twice. Can confirm - it sucks.

[0] https://www.kompas.id/baca/humaniora/2023/09/08/tren-angka-k...

Dengue has a huge emotional and economic cost beyond the dry survival rate statistics.

The article quotes a researcher flat out stating "the virus will probably find a way to overcome the Wolbachia effect". They still think their work to ease the agony and suffering of millions is worthwhile, despite it not being a magic bullet.

Presumably, the 99% survival rate is for the first infection. Follow on infections of dengue are increasingly dangerous.

I believe conditions like this cause impact to people's livelihood by putting them out of action.

Caring for the sick also has economic costs.

Dengue is the poster child for antibody dependent enhancement: The first infection is typically pretty mild, but there's 4 Dengue strains and a second infection with one of the other 3 is much more severe.

The original vaccines for these had to be scrapped because they had the same effect, though current ones work against all 4 strains.

It's the means. If people wanted to look for ways to help reduce stagnant water, as a means of reducing mosquito populations, I suspect exactly 0 people would object. But releasing billions of mosquitos with a bacteria and hoping there's no natural evolution to it, and everything continues to work as planned indefinitely...? There's more than sufficient reason for skepticism there.

Beyond this, I would also consider the arrogance of the present. When you look back at stupid decisions made in times past, it's not like they just blindly rushed into them (well not always at least). They certainly assessed them using the latest knowledge available at the time, and then moved forward after it was deemed safe and effective. It just turns out that we're quite frequently wrong on such assessments, and so things that fail in 'obvious' ways only look obvious with the benefit of hindsight. It's like how NASA can lose a half a billion dollar probe in modern times because nobody bothered to ensure that all systems were using the same unit systems. [1]

Take yourself a decade in the future and imagine reading about these mosquitoes gaining, at the minimum, a resistance to the bacteria being used. Would it really surprise you? Or would you be thinking something more along the lines of, 'Wow, how could they not see that coming?'

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter

On this case of the Aedes Aegypti in the Americas, should not even be a big consideration whether to exterminate or not, since it's an invasive species from Asia.

> yes, that includes even the armchair criticism from cynical misanthropes who consider human deaths resulting from this species a good thing

If ever there was a species under no threat whatsoever it's those guys. I'm all for eradicate and move on, nature will be bound to throw something else at humanity so go for the small wins and to heck with it.

I think part of this is that the idea can be unfamiliar and so people try to come to random conclusions or raise concerns that have already been considered (or they just disagree with the prevailing view). The search term for this kind of thing is ‘planned extinction’ and it perhaps won’t surprise you to hear that A. aegypti is the most common candidate. Another case is the (new world) screwworm fly which has been eliminated from North America and most of Central America by the United States (it being easier to try to control spread through Panama than from Mexico). There was a New Yorker article posted here a while ago about the elimination efforts. I’m not sure farmers in Colombia or the rest of South America would mind much if the species were totally eradicated.