Seeking “a cheap and effective way to eliminate malaria from entire regions,” a team at Imperial College London’s Department of Life Sciences have modified mosquitos to produce sperm that creates 95 percent male offspring, leading to hopes that Malaria–which still kills 627,000 people per year, according to World Health Organization estimates–will be completely eradicated. The report, “A synthetic sex ratio distortion system for the control of the human malaria mosquito,” was published in Nature Communications Tuesday. The report represents six years of research. The Imperial College team tested their proceedure in five labratory cages. Genetically modified mosquitoes were introduced
Disease
Mosquito Populations Can Be Decimated With a New Procedure, Causing Hopes of Total Malaria Eradication
Wild Poliovirus International Spread “Extraordinary” After Near-Eradication of Virus Last Year, WHO Says
The IHR Emergency Committee of the World Health Organization met last week on the “extraordinary” international spread of wild polioviruses in 2014, and voted unanimously on measures to stem the resurgence of endemic and internationally exported polioviruses, which were thought to have been nearly eradicated in 2013. In the informational session of the meeting, affected States Parties presented information on developments in their nations, including Afghanistan, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Israel, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia and the Syrian Arab Republic, after which the Committee called the public health risk to thus-far unaffected States an “extraordinary event” and warned that a coordinated
