“As part of its successful “Debug” program, Google is tapping into its tech expertise to raise an army of sterile male mosquitoes to lower the number of illness-spreading bugs. Mosquitoes – the world’s deadliest animal – kill more people than any other creature in the world every year by spreading lethal diseases such as dengue, West Nile virus, Zika, chikungunya and malaria.
Male mosquitoes don’t bite or carry disease. One of the main approaches Google is testing involves rearing male mosquitoes with a naturally occurring bacterium, called wolbachia, which stops them from having offspring with wild female mosquitoes. When an infected male tries to mate with a wild female, her eggs won’t hatch; Google explains in a blogpost: “the population gets smaller with each generation.”
Google’s efforts here build on a technique that has been around for a while: “The company is drawing on a scientific method called the sterile insect technique, which experts have used on a variety of problematic bugs for decades. Eric Caragata, an assistant professor at the University of Florida who specializes in mosquito-microbe interactions, told USA Today that using the wolbachia bacteria for sterilization had been done for about 15 years.
For now, Google is focusing their initial efforts on one species of mosquito known as Aedes aegypti, which is responsible for spreading most cases of dengue, Zika, yellow fever and chikungunya. Google’s engineers and scientists are using data analytics and sensors to build “automated rearing systems” for the fragile creatures, the company says. Part of the challenge entails using AI-powered computer vision to precisely separate males from females and releasing the males “in the right place and in the right numbers”.
It’s experiments elsewhere have shown significant benefits: “…by releasing millions of male wolbachia mosquitoes in Singapore, the country has “achieved 80-90% suppression” of the Aedes aegypti mosquito population and more than 70% reduction in dengue incidents after 6 to 12 months of releases.”
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