After a decade of fighting for regulatory approval and public acceptance, a biotechnology firm has released genetically engineered mosquitoes into the open air in the United States for the first time. The experiment, launched this week in the Florida Keys—over the objections of some local critics—tests a method for suppressing populations of wild Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which can carry diseases such as Zika, dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever.
Oxitec, the firm based in Abingdon, UK, that developed the mosquitoes, has previously field-tested the insects in Brazil, Panama, the Cayman Islands and Malaysia.
…In late April of this year, project researchers placed boxes containing Oxitec’s mosquito eggs at 6 locations in 3 areas of the Keys. The first males are expected to emerge within the first 2 weeks of May. About 12,000 males will exit the boxes each week over the next 12 weeks. In a second phase later this year, intended to collect even more data, nearly 20 million mosquitoes will emerge over a period of about 16 weeks, according to Oxitec…The biotech firm plans to present the results to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which gave the green light for the trial. The data will help the EPA to determine whether Oxitec can release the mosquitoes more broadly in the United States. The company is still testing them in Brazil and other countries.
…Residential pushback: Opposition to the Florida field trial has been fierce from some residents in the Keys. Worried about being bitten by the mosquitoes or that the insects will disrupt the Florida ecosystem—and generally unhappy about being chosen as a test site—some have threatened to derail the experiments by spraying insecticides near the release points. “As you can imagine, emotions run high, and there are people who feel really strongly either for or against it”, says molecular biologist Natalie Kofler, who lectures at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is the founder of Editing Nature, an organization that advocates for responsible development and oversight of gene-editing technologies. “And I can see how, if you didn’t agree to this, it could be really concerning to have mosquitoes released in your neighborhood.”