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In an effort to cut down on the mosquito population, engineers have been working on a special fungus that could kill the malaria-spreading insects.
Malaria, which has affected over 200 million people across 87 countries, is responsible for over 400,000 deaths a year. Mosquitoes are the most well-known carriers of the disease.
But, what scientists were noticing was that the insecticides are no longer killing these mosquitoes. So, they decided to change their plan of attack. They developed a fungus mixed with poison from a spider to do the trick. And, so far, the results seem very promising.
Almost all of malaria cases are found in Africa. Scientists felt this would be the ideal place to try out their experiment. The fungus is called Metarhizium pingshaense. By adding a spider gene, the fungus became even deadlier. It showed great results in the lab, but that does not translate well to the everyday conditions of being outside in nature. They took their experiment on the road to a village in a western region of Burkina Faso, where malaria is very common.
They knew they couldn’t just spray the pesticide into the general population without having fully tested it, so they built a giant frame to contain the area. It was enclosed with two layers of netting and the frame was divided up into sections with different huts. One hut had a cloth with no spores, another had normal spores from fungi without spider toxin. The third hut had the spores from the hybrid fungi. Each hut was filled with 1,000 adult male mosquitoes and 500 females. A black cloth was hung in the huts to give female mosquitoes a place to rest after feeding.
The hut that had no change saw 921 mosquitoes hatch in the first generation and then 1,396 in the second generation. The second hut saw 436 mosquitoes hatch in the first generation and 455 in the second. The third hut, which contained the new fungus, saw 399 mosquitoes hatch in the first generation and only 13 in the second. That would not be enough to form a mating swarm, thus eventually eliminating the mosquito population. The test worked!
The next step will be to take it to a real-world setting and see if the same results continue. This could be exactly what is needed to put an end to malaria across the world.
