NPR’s Fresh Air last night had on Ed Yong, author of “I Contain Multitudes” about the microbiomes in our bodies and in the environment.
Anywho, he mentioned a fascinating approach to fighting diseases like Zika by using a bacterium called Wolbachia:
Wolbachia turns out to be a really powerful way of controlling mosquito-borne diseases. So scientists in Australia have spent about 25 years trying to load this bacterium into Aedes aegypti, the tiger mosquito, the one that spreads dengue and yellow fever and infamously now Zika. And they’ve been trying to do this because Wolbachia seems to prevent these insects from transmitting the viruses behind these diseases.
And Wolbachia is so good at spreading through a wild population that if you release a small number of these infected mosquitoes, they ought to fly off into the distance and then within months Wolbachia should be everywhere, thus rendering this entire community of insects unable to spread disease.
The approach was initially developed in order to eliminate dengue fever, but it seems to work against Zika, as well against a lot of other mosquito-borne diseases, and it has tremendous advantages. The - unlike, say, insecticides, which are toxic and need to be continuously resprayed, Wolbachia in these mosquitoes seems to have no problems, no safety risks. And it sustains itself. Once you release the insects, they go off on their business and you don’t need to keep on replenishing them.