By Edgar Su and Joseph Campbell
SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Since the most sensible public construction in Singapore, an environmental official is stabilizing his mosquito launcher, the newest device designed by the government to combat a record epidemic of dengue, a tropical disease.
With the click of an yetton and the roar of a fan, a hatch opens and 150 male mosquitoes raised in the laboratory are sent to fly, looking for a couple with which they can mate but not reproduce.
Dengue virus, which in rare cases can be fatal, is transported to humans through inflamed mosquitoes.
But mosquitoes especially bred in Singapore a bacterium that prevents eggs from hatching and “rivaling the wild guy,” leading to “slow relief in the mosquito population,” said Ng Lee Ching, Wolbachia’s allocation manager, named after the bacteria.
Some spaces with a higher mosquito population have experienced a decrease of up to 90% with this technique, he added.
Singapore, a small island country in Southeast Asia with 5. 7 million more people, has recorded more than 26,000 cases of dengue this year, surpassing the last annual record of around 22,000 in 2013 with 4 months remaining.
Twenty other people died from the disease this year, which can cause excessive fever causing internal bleeding and shock, compared to only 27 other people died of coronavirus in the city-state of more than 56,000 infections.
A new strain of the disease, combined with a rainy climate for the season and coronavirus locks that have left intact the structure sites and other mosquito breeding sites, are considered points of the dengue epidemic.
This has imposed a duty on classic deterrents such as fog, fines for disobeying mosquito regulations, such as leaving pots full of water and deploying new techniques such as the Wolbachia project.
In government laboratories, scientists breed bacteria-carrying mosquitoes in rows of popsicles, separating male pupae and releasing them into spaces with the greatest threat of dengue.
For both users living in those areas, up to six Wolbachia mosquitoes are released per week, the surrounding firm said.
Wolbachia mosquitoes transmit diseases such as dengue and only women bite humans.
When Wolbachia male mosquitoes mate with women who bring the bacteria, none of the resulting eggs will hatch.
The strategy has been a success in Australia, but some experts say it may have its limits in dense urban spaces like Singapore.
“You have to flood the island with those mosquitoes and people get angry,” said Paul Tambyah, lead representative of Singapore’s National University Hospital.
“They’re not going to catch the mosquito and read about it and see if it’s an uncle or a woguy. They’re going to sweep them, and that’s against the target,” he said.
(Written through John Geddie; Edited through Gerry Doyle)