Can genetically modified mosquitoes wipe out malaria?
Current prevention methods for malaria do their best but fail miserably. There’s no vaccine. There is pre-exposure prevention treatment and post-exposure medical care, both of which are too expensive for the people most affected by the disease. To date, the prevention method that seems to work best — and is the cheapest to implement on a wide scale — is mosquito netting doused in repellant. And still, in sub-Saharan Africa, a young child dies of malaria every 30 seconds. So the sudden, possible viability of a cheap, gene-based prevention method is big news. The mosquito-transfer method of spreading malaria is an effective one. It works something like this: When a female Anopheles mosquito is laying eggs, she needs extra protein, which she
