Dengue infections are on the rise in many parts of the world, thanks to climate change and the expansion of the range of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. While some public health agencies are slowly rolling outtwo licensed vaccines, a few countries are also testing a novel intervention to battle these mosquitoes and the diseases they spread.
Researchers at the nonprofit World Mosquito Program (WMP) have been releasing mosquitoes infected with a bacterium called Wolbachia as a way to control dengue. On Nov. 16, at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene annual meeting in New Orleans, Katie Anders, the WMP’s director of impact assessment, presented results from Niterói, a city in Brazil where Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes were first deployed in 2015.