This refers to the article, "Dengue, another climate alert" (September 28), every year, malaria/dengue carrying mosquitoes kill more than 600,000 people, most of them children. Over the centuries, people have battled these mosquitoes in many ways, including draining swamps, spraying insecticides and distributing millions of bed nets. Our cities with poor sanitation, garbage piles, water barrels, old tires etc provide the ideal breeding places for mosquitoes. The dengue mosquito maybe adapting to climate change and if so this is no surprise. Insects rapidly do this in a few generations and this is apparent with the pesticide resistant insects that afflict our food grains. Two new promising technologies involve editing DNA to render the insects resistant to the parasite or to engineer infertility into mosquito DNA. Scientists consider using genetically modified mosquitoes to combat many deadly diseases in the developing world. Brazil and a few other countries in South America are trying out this technology by releasing genetically engineered members of mosquito created in a lab. The larvae die before they mature. Our scientists could look into this to rein in the rising number of dengue cases.
HN Ramakrishna Bengaluru
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