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April 10, 2022 01:34 am

In California, an Army of Genetically Engineered Mosquitoes Awaits Release

The U.S. government recently gave California approval to release millions of genetically engineered mosquitoes bred by British biotech company Oxitec, reports the Los Angeles Times:Oxitec, a private company, says its genetically modified bugs could help save half the world's population from the invasive Aedes aegypti mosquito, which can spread diseases such as yellow fever, chikungunya and dengue to humans. Female offspring produced by these modified insects will die, according to Oxitec's plan, causing the population to collapse. "Precise. Environmentally sustainable. Non-toxic," the company says on its website of its product trademarked as the "Friendly" mosquito. Scientists independent from the company and critical of the proposal say not so fast. They say unleashing the experimental creatures into nature has risks that haven't yet been fully studied, including possible harm to other species or unexpectedly making the local mosquito population harder to control.... Nathan Rose, Oxitec's head of regulatory affairs, noted that the company found its mosquito reduced the population in a Brazilian neighborhood by 95% in just 13 weeks. So far, Oxitec has released little of its data from that experiment or from a more recent release in the Florida Keys. It hasn't yet published any of those results in a peer-reviewed scientific journal — publications that scientists expect when evaluating a new drug or technology.... Among scientists' concerns is that releasing the genetically modified mosquitoes into neighborhoods could create hybrids that are hardier and more dangerous to humans than the state's current population.... An EPA spokesperson said regulators expected that mosquitoes with the corporate genes "would disappear from the environment within 10 generations of mosquitoes because they are not able to reproduce as successfully as local populations." To prove this, the agency has required Oxitec to monitor neighborhoods for mosquitoes that have DNA from its engineered insects until none have been found for at least 10 consecutive weeks. One bioethicist at Harvard Medical School told the Times that California has never had a case where this breed of mosquitos had actually transmitted disease, and argued that America's Environmental Protection Agency was "not a modern enough regulatory structure for a very modern and complicated technology." After the U.S. government's approval, the genetically-engineered mosquitors still face several more months of scientific evaluation from California's Department of Pesticide Regulation. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the link

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