U.S. grant helps optimize nuclear technique to reduce disease-transmitting mosquito populations

Using a nuclear technique applied at a large scale against agricultural pests around the world to control disease-transmitting mosquitoes has been an elusive goal for scientists over the last decade.

Thanks to a US$ 3.96 million grant to the IAEA by the U.S. Government, important milestones have been reached in recent years. The research has been implemented in cooperation with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

Optimizing the mass rearing of mosquitoes for sterile insect technique (SIT) applications and improving technologies to separate males from females, both being crucial for large-scale implementation of the technique, are key outcomes.

“The focus of this research was to develop the SIT package for disease-transmitting mosquitoes, with an emphasis on the Aedes mosquito which transmits the Zika virus, and to pass on this technology to the Member States,” said Rui Cardoso Pereira, Head of the Insect Pest Control Section at the FAO/IAEA Joint Division of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture. “Thanks to this grant, more advanced and cost-effective tools are now available for any country wishing to carry out pilot trials.”

More than half of the world’s population lives in areas where this mosquito species is present, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). In addition to the Zika virus, the Aedes mosquito also carries viruses that cause chikungunya, yellow fever and dengue fever, among others.

SIT is an environment-friendly insect pest control method involving the mass-rearing and sterilization, using radiation, of a target pest, followed by the systematic area-wide release of the sterile males by ground or by air over defined areas. Released males mate with wild females resulting in no offspring, which leads to a declining pest population.

Following the success of this R&D project, the U.S. Government provided an additional contribution of US$ 1.47 million starting in July 2019 to continue the project activities for another year, with a focus on transferring the technology from the laboratory to the field.

Original source: IAEA
Published on 11 September 2019