India may soon get Oz tech to control dengue

Australians have achieved a major breakthrough in controlling dengue and hope to transfer this not-for-profit technology to India, which is recording some of the highest number of dengue cases in the world. The Eliminate Dengue Research Programme (EDRP) has found that by transferring the Wolbachia bacteria, found in the common fruit fly, into the dengue mosquito called the aedes aegypti, the latter’s ability to transmit the dengue virus gets substantially reduced. The EDRP breakthrough was achieved by lead scientist Scott O’Neil, who has worked on this project for more than a decade and initially injected the Wolbachia bacteria individually into mosquitoes by using a fine needle. Dr Peter Ryan, project manager of Melbourne’s Monash University which oversaw this research, pointed out, “Wolbachia acts like a vaccine for the mosquito by blocking the dengue virus transmission by mosquitoes, thereby, preventing human beings from being infected.” Dr Ryan was recently in India to interact with the ministry of health officials and to make a presentation at a biotechnology meet to highlight how the presence of Wolbachia also prevents the transmission of viruses which caused chikungunya and yellow fever as well as parasites that caused malaria. The next step of the research, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation under the Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative, was to seed wild mosquito populations with bacteria through a controlled number of releases of the Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes that could then breed with the wild population. An experiment was tried out in Cairn located in north Australia in 2011 where Wolbachia carrying mosquitoes where released on a weekly basis for ten weeks with the prior approval of the local communities. “At the beginning, there was some uncertainty about this new approach since we were not introducing a new vaccine or drug but rather introducing a mosquito into the community,” said Dr Ryan. “But two years later, we stand confirmed that 80 per cent of mosquitoes cannot transmit dengue. We have to now test this on a larger sample size which is why we are planning to undertake this experiment in both Vietnam and Indonesia,” Dr Peter Ryan added.