Inside Singapore's Wolbachia mosquito-breeding facility, set up to fight dengue

How do you produce 7 million Wolbachia mosquitoes a week? We got a detailed look inside Singapore's Wolbachia mosquito-breeding facility.

Project Wolbachia aims to fight dengue by producing and releasing non-biting male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes at selected locations to mate with their female counterparts. The resulting eggs do not hatch.

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Interesting, fighting mosquitoes with mosquitoes. I didn't take dengue seriously when I was a kid but dengue is a vile disease and it's worth investing so much to reduce its spread. Back in 2020, I caught dengue from going into my (then) garden for 5 minutes, and it's the worst infectious disease I've gotten. I was bedridden for a week, even sitting up to eat or use the bathroom made me nauseous, my 39C fever wouldn't go away for days despite taking the max dose of Panadol. When I recovered, I lost almost 10% of my body weight, my brain was factory reset for the next few weeks, and I lost all my momentum in my studies. My case wasn't even considered severe and I didn't need to be hospitalized. What makes it so much more problematic than covid is not just how the symptoms are much more severe on average, but also that unlike covid, the risk of serious illness and death increases a lot more if you get it again and there are 4 serotypes. I've gotten covid too and I would rather get covid another 5 times than get dengue again.

It's very hard to manage the spread of dengue no matter what your area is like. I lived in a landed area with only residential houses when I caught dengue and my area was a cluster of 200. Everyone had their windows wide open and no one cared, my family tried our best to put mosquito nets on all the windows but my mom and I still got dengue from a short walk outside. When I moved last year, the condo next to me had almost 500 cases despite fogging all the time.

The last time I read about this project last year, the biggest clusters were either condos or landed areas, but this project only released the male mosquitoes into HDB areas. I'm not sure if this is still the case, I hope they get to release these mosquitoes all across Singapore to do a more thorough wipe-out. I'm not sure what the rest of the commenters are cooking but we should try to make aedes mosquitoes as extinct as possible. I hope to see effects on the statistics of the aedes mosquito population and dengue cases in Singapore.

[junweigoh]

What they don't tell you is that even though the guys don't bite, they still love humans and will take any chance they get to annoy you. This project's taking place in my neighbourhood right now, and it's infuriating walking into a room and getting swarmed. You can't tell which are male and female too, so even if you try not to kill them, you might still end up being bitten.

[fixiusdota]

Mosquitoman in the making.. like Spiderman

[maryidaliamars]

How does one get in contact with this lab, to bring this to the Dominican Republic!?

[leedevlin]

I wonder wat the error of probability is during the sorting process of male and female and the effect it might have if a female was accidentally release

[vicky]

Si much of sophistication for mosquito breeding! To think they can outwit nature.
Oh the hubris of man...

[ONGCHENGKOON]

i just got a wolbachia in my house in a net. using it for experiments

[anziar]

There is a breed involving pritam singh of WP and lee hsien yang of PSP. Both of them are pursued by the police for lying under oath.

[chanipowell]

Has anyone else in the vicinity of the world mosquito program experienced any health issues after the program? I have caught 4 different mosquito viruses since the trial was rolled out near me in Townsville. I have found evidence linking West Nile Kunjin virus to it as a acceptable health risk, which was actually the first virus I caught after the program, then an unspecified Flavi virus, Ross river fever and Dengue has also been flagged in me recently.

[GoodMorning-bw]

so that is why the country i live in, which is a desert with rare rain has a mosquito crisis now.. and i haven't see any mosquitoes since i was born, until almost two years ago.. my country is in asia.. now i know why we have mosquitoes...thx singapore for ruining my life (no hate... just kidding.. my life is ruined for real tho)

[cholesterol]

Cant breed human talent though so just import them.😂 Its not even about shortage of people problem with infinite reskill program.