NEW YORK ¨C Mosquitoes are much more than a bloodsucking annoyance. For close to half of the world, they represent disease and death.
In some tropical regions, they transmit a powerful virus called dengue that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year. Dengue is the world¡¯s fastest-spreading tropical illness, and with accelerating climate change, is appearing in nontropical areas once free from it, including the southern U.S. By 2080, scientists predict the sickness could affect 2 billion people worldwide.
That¡¯s where Scott O¡¯Neill, the founder of The World Mosquito Project, comes in.
In the second installment of Moonshot, a Bloomberg Originals series, we look at the nonprofit that aims to eliminate dengue. O¡¯Neill and his colleagues plan to genetically alter the Aedes aegypti mosquito, the primary vector for infecting humans with it.
After modifying the insects with a bacteria called Wolbachia, which blocks transmission of the disease to humans, the team releases them out into the world. ¡°My hope,¡± O¡¯Neill says, ¡°would be that we could eliminate dengue at some point.¡±
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