Mosquitoes won't bite if they can't take flight

Researchers believe they are on the cusp of a major breakthrough in combatting what one of them calls "the most dangerous animals in the world," infecting millions of people and causing countless deaths in tropical countries.

To Canadians, they can be everything from a minor irritant to a major pest that can, in rare instances, cause death.

We're talking mosquitoes, transmitters of viruses that cause diseases such as dengue fever, malaria and yellow fever in tropical countries.

Dengue fever infects 50 million to 100 million people a year and causes 40,000 deaths. There are no vaccines or drugs to stop the disease. Insecticides are used to control dengue outbreaks, but are "grossly ineffective," said microbiologist Anthony James.

James, of the University of California, Irvine, and colleague Luke Alphey of the University of Oxford in England have come up with a new way to combat mosquitoes that transmit dengue fever using genetic engineering instead of insecticides.

Their research, described in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, involves creating genetically altered male mosquitoes to breed female mosquitoes – the ones that bite – without wings.

The idea is simple.

They won't bite if they can't take flight.

While their research targets one species of mosquito – the Aedes aegypti – that transmits dengue fever, the same concept can be applied to other species, including those that cause West Nile virus and encephalitis in Canada and the United States, or even just to combat the nuisance factor, James said.

Further studies have to be carried out but the method could be ready for use, subject to regulatory approvals, in two years, he said.

He believes the method, subject to further tests, will be more cost effective and environmentally safer than insecticides.

Several countries, including Mexico, are being considered for field testing.