Guinea Pigs for a Zika Cure

Would you want to be the beta testing site for a new genetically modified mosquito — even if it was bred to knock out the Zika virus?

“With the start of mosquito season, public health officials are faced with important decisions about mosquitoes and how to best protect citizens,” said one researcher.

Some residents in the Florida Keys neighborhood where the mosquitoes are scheduled to be released soon don’t appear all that happy about it.

Oxitec, a British company, has been trying for years to get approval to do testing in the Keys. Some residents have tried to kill the field trial, concerned about unanticipated consequences of introducing lab-grown insects into the wild.

Researchers with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that respondents are worried they may actually contract diseases including dengue, chikungunya, and Zika from these new insects.

The goal, according to the Food and Drug Administration, is the opposite.

The new male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are bred to mate with wild females and produce offspring with a defective gene that kills them — thereby reducing the population of disease-carrying mosquitoes. The method has been tried with some success in both Brazil and Panama.

The survey was conducted in the second half of 2015, after locally transmitted dengue and chikungunya cases had been discovered in Florida, but before the Zika epidemic in South and Central America became big news. There is concern Zika could spread north into the continental U.S. The band from southern Florida, including the Keys, to southern Texas, as well as Hawaii, is believed to be the region of the U.S. that is most at risk.

Related: The Zika Train Has Already Left the Station

“With the start of mosquito season here and all of the media coverage of Zika, public health officials are going to be faced with important decisions about mosquitoes and how to best protect citizens,” said Dr. Meghan McGinty, MPH, from the Bloomberg School. She is one of the researchers. “People will have objections and it is critical for them to be heard. Our research provides a starting point to understand how the community feels and to begin a dialogue about how to address mosquito-borne diseases.”

The most popular mosquito control method was draining standing water to reduce breeding; that was followed by treating standing water with larvicides designed to kill new mosquitoes before they hatch, and spraying insecticides. The least popular was using genetically modified mosquitoes to reduce the population — with women more opposed to it than men.

The most common objection was a concern over disturbing the local ecosystem by eliminating mosquitoes from the food chain. Respondents were also concerned that using genetically modified mosquitoes could lead to an increase in the use of other genetically modified products. The findings were published last month in PLOS Currents Outbreaks.

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