Fresno, meet Aedes aegypti.
Aedes aegypti, meet Fresno.
In perhaps its most buzz-worthy project ever, Google’s sister company Verily has begun releasing 20 million mosquitoes in two neighborhoods in the state’s fifth-largest city, a fledgling effort to solve one of the planet’s most devastating health problems, one mosquito at a time.
The so-called Debug Project by Alphabet’s life-sciences unit has set itself a lofty goal: “To reduce the devastating global health impact that disease-carrying mosquitoes inflict on people around the world.”
In its first-ever field study to test a potential mosquito-control method using sterile insects, Verily is collaborating with MosquitoMate and Fresno County’s Consolidated Mosquito Abatement District (CMAD) to test its theory: Debug Fresno will target the invasive Aedes aegypti mosquito, which can transmit diseases like Zika, dengue and chikungunya. The idea is that when these sterile males, which have been treated with a naturally occurring bacterium called Wolbachia, mate with wild females, which carry the diseases, the resulting eggs will not hatch. End of story, hopefully.
Once the males and females do their thing, Verily will then compare the adult population density and egg-hatching success in the two targeted neighborhoods with two control neighborhoods.
Verily is adding its Alphabet credentials to its partnership with CMAD and Kentucky-based MosquitoMate, which teamed up last year for a first-ever mosquito release. But this time the group will release 25 times as many insects, dispatching 1 million sterile males each week. How do they even count them, you ask? The release, said Verily, is “made possible by the automated mass rearing and sex-sorting processes developed at Verily. Additionally, our software algorithms and on-the-ground release devices will allow us to distribute the sterile male mosquitoes in an even and targeted way throughout Fresno’s mosquito season.”
The good news: Since male mosquitoes don’t bite, the people of Fresno won’t be doing more than the normal amount of scratching over the next 20 weeks. And the even better news, if the experiment works, is that residents will see a steep decline in the presence of Aedes aegypti in their communities.
Linus Upson, a senior engineer at Verily, told the MIT Technology Review that this could ultimately become a cost-effective way to control mosquito populations, and get rid of diseases (though he didn’t say how much exactly this experiment actually costs).
“If we really want to be able to help people globally, we need to be able to produce a lot of mosquitoes, distribute them to where they need to be, and measure the populations at very, very low costs,” he said. “We want to show this can work in different kinds of environments,” he told the magazine.
