Release thousands of mosquitos Aedes aegypti Sterilized males is part of a pilot plan with which Uruguay will fight against a scourge every summer: the increase in dengue cases.
This is how he explains it in an interview with EFE the head of the Department of Parasitology and Mycology of the Institute of Hygiene of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of the Republic of Uruguay, Yester Basmadjián.
On May 31, the last daily report delivered by the Ministry of Public Health indicated that the South American country had registered 702 cases up to that point. dengue autochthonous and 410 imported. There were also five deaths.
Meanwhile, the dengue epidemic in America has claimed 7,713 lives in 2024 with 12.6 million cases recorded, a record that practically triples the data from the previous year, as reported by the Pan American Health Organization.
According to Basmadjián, who was quoted in December in the scientific journal Naturetemperature and rainfall will allow the life cycle of mosquitoes to develop, so dengue cases will probably increase in Uruguay this summer.
To fight against Aedes aegyptiwhich proliferate in home habitats, the first step is to eliminate all possible breeding sites present in homes, in addition to personal protection using repellents or the use of mosquito nets and long-sleeved clothing.
These measures, he says, have not been extremely effective, so new ones are added such as the sterile mosquito technique, which will be implemented this year for the first time in Uruguay.
This multicenter project is led by the International Atomic Energy Agency (DEBT) and has the collaboration of the Ministries of Health of different countries.
“The idea is to release sterile mosquitoes to try to gradually reduce the population,” explains the scientist.
Sterilizing male mosquitoes with nuclear energy, which are not hematophagous (they do not bite), prevents females from having viable offspring, since they only use the sperm from the first copulation.
Uruguay began monitoring Aedes aegypti in three similar locations in the department (province) of Canelones, to have an idea of the growth curve throughout the year.
In the pilot test that will be carried out, batches of 30,000 mosquitoes will be released—approximately every 15 days, depending on breeding capacity—in one of these three locations to evaluate the effectiveness of the measure, details the parasitologist.
“We are now in the stage of mass breeding for release. We needed the irradiator, which arrived ten days ago in Uruguay, we have to install it and once we have it we will begin to sterilize the adult male mosquitoes to release them,” he adds.
In places where these irradiated mosquitoes have been released, such as Cuba y BrazilHe points out, “the transmission of dengue has not been completely stopped, but the number of infected patients has decreased significantly.”
It is a mosquito from Africa, which managed to be eradicated on the continent in the 1940s and was reintroduced to Uruguay in 1997, at which time the Ministry of Public Health carried out many education campaigns.
Despite this, the mosquito has dispersed year after year, until now “there is no department that does not have an infestation,” says Basmadjián.
“Since the 80s, it slowly dispersed into a completely different world (…), full of plastic and containers that can serve as breeding grounds.“, says the parasitologist, who considers it key that “the citizen himself understands that his home offers adequate conditions for this mosquito to breed.”
“There are always imported cases, of people who travel to countries where there is dengue transmission and come back, which are the ones that generate viral circulation,” he says, while warning that not all are symptomatic.
Given the impossibility of controlling the border movement of this infectious disease, the expert emphasizes the importance of combining personal protection and the tools provided by the State to reduce the mosquito population.
(With information from EFE)
