This is something I came across. Call me oblivious, I never heard of them. They want to release genetically modified mosquitos in the Keys to help prevent the spread of Zika virus. Good idea or bad?
To skeptics, that’s exactly the problem. There’s no way to control with confidence the environment the GM mosquitoes will be released into—or how those insects will respond in the crucible of life.
“People become experiments that they can’t opt out of,” says Dana Perls, a food and technology policy campaigner at the environmental group Friends of the Earth.
“We don’t know how the GM mosquito would thrive in the wild. It could cause more problems.” The sentiment that modified mosquitoes add to the harm rather than curb it—whether accurate or not—isn’t uncommon. In a recent survey, when people were asked if they thought GM mosquitoes caused Zika or were being used to fight it, 30% said they thought those modified mosquitoes were the culprit.
Others are wary about the risk of relying solely on one form of mosquito control. “It’s important to have more than one tool,” says Anthony James, a professor at the University of California, Irvine who is working on a malaria-fighting mosquito. “We learned that with DDT. DDT shut down a lot of research because people thought, ‘oh, we have the magic bullet!’ It didn’t solve all the problems, [and] we are back at a situation where it’s worse now.”
At the same time, skeptics wonder what could go wrong even if Oxitec’s technology goes right. Aegypti are not native to the Western Hemisphere, so there’s an argument that they can be removed like any other invasive species.
But since they’ve settled into local ecosystems, their absence could have a cascade effect. “We don’t think wiping out the species is a realistic risk, but if you interfere with the numbers of species then you can have effects both directly on humans in terms of their immunity to disease but also on other species,” says Helen Wallace director of GeneWatch U.K. “Oxitec has been pushing to say that this technology is ready for prime time and that they can roll it out as a commercial application but we don’t think there’s been adequate safety testing of the genetic change itself.”
Researchers note that even if the aegytpi are eliminated, it’s possible another type of mosquito could step up and start spreading dengue or Zika.
“It has been observed previously that if a vacant niche is created by suppressing or locally eradicating Aedes aegypti, an ecological homologue may move in, most likely the invasive Asian Tiger Mosquito, Aedes albopictus, which is just as good a vector of Zika, dengue, and chikungunya, as aegypti,” says the University of Florida’s Lounibos.
Oxitec’s struggles in the U.S. underscore just how controversial this weapon in the war against mosquitoes is. The company currently has a pending application with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for a release project in the Florida Keys, where theaegypti mosquito is present. Oxitec opened its application with the FDA in 2011, and while the stateside aegypti mosquitoes don’t currently transmit Zika, experts have suggested future transmission on a small scale could be possible if the aegypti come in contact with infected travelers who bring Zika back with them from hard-hit countries.
While early surveys suggested that most Keys residents were in favor of the project—which was initially proposed as a way to fight dengue—a change.org petition filed by a local resident protesting the project has garnered well over 160,000 signatures. The application is still pending FDA determination, and people on both side of the debate are awaiting the decision.
“We are very concerned that we don’t really know about what will happen if you put a genetically modified mosquito into our local environment,” says Michael Welber, a Florida Keys resident and environmental activist. “As a country we have a tendency to overreact to these things and then do things that we later regret and wish we could take back.”
