Promising results from study on mosquitoes has researchers buzzing in Honduras

This matters because Wolbachia dramatically reduces the likelihood that mosquitoes will transmit diseases like dengue fever, a potentially deadly disease which affects an estimated 100–400 million people worldwide each year.

The team at the MSF Arbovirus Prevention Project released over 8 million mosquitoes deliberately infected with the bacteria in El Manchén last year. Their hope was that the mosquitoes would thrive, reproducing and passing Wolbachia down through the generations, radically reducing the rate of dengue in the area.

However, a lot could go wrong.

“As we continued to release mosquitos, this meant there were more and more of them in the area, which caused distress to the local communities,” says Edgard Boquín, coordinator of the project. “At the same time, another dengue epidemic broke out in the capital. This made it more difficult to approach people about dengue. But by engaging them directly in the activities, we were able to do everything as planned.”