Mosquito control officials in the
Florida Keys
are waiting for the federal government to sign off on an experiment
that would release hundreds of thousands of genetically modified
mosquitoes to reduce the risk of
dengue fever in the tourist town of
Key West.
If approved by the Food and Drug Administration, it would be the
first such experiment in the U.S. Some Key West residents worry, though,
that not enough research has been done to determine the risks that
releasing genetically modified mosquitoes might pose to the Keys'
fragile ecosystem.
Officials are targeting the Aedes aegypti
mosquitoes because they can spread dengue fever, a disease health
officials thought had been eradicated in the U.S. until 93 cases
originated in the Keys in 2009 and 2010.
The trial planned by mosquito control
officials and the British company Oxitec would release non-biting male
mosquitoes that have been genetically modified to pass along a birth
defect that kill their progeny before reaching maturity. The idea is
that they will mate with wild females and their children will die before
reproducing. After a few generations, Key West's Aedes aegypti
population would die off, reducing the dengue fever risk without using
pesticides and at relatively a low cost, the proponents say. There is no
vaccine for dengue fever.
"The science of it, I think, looks fine. It's straight from setting up experiments and collecting data," said Michael Doyle,
pointing to research Oxitec has had published in peer-reviewed
scientific journals. He inherited the project when he took the lead at
the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District in mid-2011.
The district's website says the modified genes will disappear from
the environment after the mosquitoes carrying it die, resulting in no
permanent change to the wild mosquito population. The district also says
that the mosquito species isn't native to the Keys, nor is it an
integral food source for other animals.
Dengue fever is a viral disease that inflicts severe flu-like
symptoms — the joint pain is so severe its nickname is "breakbone
fever." It isn't fatal but victims are then susceptible at subsequent
exposures to dengue hemorrhagic fever, which can be.
"It's very uncomfortable. You ache all over, you have a terrible fever," said Joel Biddle, a Key West resident whose dengue fever symptoms lasted more than a week in 2009.
Biddle is among those concerned about the Key West trial. He worries
the modified genetic material will somehow be passed to humans or the
ecosystem, and he wants more research done. He and other Key West
residents also chafe at the fact that the project was in the works long
before it was made public late last year.
Only female mosquitoes bite, so
the modified genetic material wouldn't be passed on to humans, Mosquito
control and Oxitec officials said. They also say they're being
transparent about their data and the trial.
Real estate agent Mila de Mier
has collected more than 117,700 signatures on a petition she posted on
Change.org against the trial. Most come from outside the Keys, which de
Mier says shows that tourists don't support the mosquito control
district.
"We are dependent here on our tourists, and people from all over the country have been sending the message," de Mier said.
A University of Florida professor
who studies mosquito control said Oxitec's technology works and
evidence from the company's experiments elsewhere show it can control
mosquito populations, but it's not clear whether its methods are as
effective at controlling the risk of disease transmission. Phil Lounibos
of the Florida Medical Entomology Laboratory also said it would take
repeated releases of modified mosquitoes for the program to work, and
the public outcry against genetically modified organisms, even when it's irrational, may be insurmountable.
"The public resistance and the need to reach some agreement between
mosquito control and the public, I see that as a very significant issue,
outside of the (operating) costs, since this is not just a one-time
thing," Lounibos said.
The Aedes aegypti has shown
resistance to pesticides used to control other species, and is the most
difficult for the district to manage. Common in the Southeast and the
Caribbean, it lurks in standing water around homes and businesses and
can breed in containers as small as bottle caps.
District inspectors go door-to-door to remove the standing water
where they breed, a time-consuming task. The district spends roughly $1
million a year to suppress Aedes aegypti, 10 to 15 percent of the
agency's budget, Doyle said.
"Unfortunately, control of Aedes aegypti is a never-ending job," said
Larry Hriber, the mosquito control district's research director.
In the trial, thousands of male mosquitoes bred by Oxitec would be
released in a handful of Key West blocks where the Aedes aegypti is
known to breed; the number of mosquitoes in those neighborhoods would be
measured against the numbers from similar blocks where no modified
mosquitoes were released.
The state's agriculture
department oversees the mosquito control district, and Doyle said he
would not expect any challenge from the state if the FDA signed off on
the trial. The mosquito control district wouldn't need any local permit
for the trial, either, but officials held a public meeting earlier this
year and have posted information on the agency's website.
That trial may be years away. FDA spokeswoman Morgan Liscinsky said
no genetically modified species can be released without approval.
There hasn't been a case of dengue fever in Key West since November
2010, but two other cases were reported elsewhere in South Florida this
fall.
The mosquito trial proposed for Key West wouldn't be the first release of genetically modified insects in the U.S.
In 2009, the U.S. Department of
Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service concluded that
integrating genetically modified pink bollworms, bred by Oxitec to be
sterile but more competitive in mating than regular bollworms, into the
agency's plant pest control program was "the environmentally preferable
alternative" to combat the cotton pest. The program was discontinued,
however, after officials found that the genetically modified insects
were not as hardy as pink bollworms sterilized through irradiation, and
that their use in organic cotton fields would cause farmers to lose
their certification.
Oxitec said the USDA's
environmental assessment is one of several examples of proof that the
trial's risks and methods are being independently evaluated. The company
has trials in Brazil, the Cayman Islands and Malaysia, and it says it's
gotten positive reviews from the latter two governments. It also cites
its published research in peer-reviewed journals.
But Biddle, the onetime dengue patient, wants Oxitec to continue testing the modified mosquitoes outside the U.S.
"Why the rush here?" the Key West
man said. "We already have test cases in the world where we can watch
what is happening and make the best studies, because wouldn't it be
wonderful if we could find out how it can be fail-safe — which it is not
right now. It's an open Pandora's box."
That
all-American food, peanut butter, began with the devastation of
American cotton by the boll weevil and the cultivation of peanuts as an
alternative cash crop. As America advanced in the world, so did peanut
butter. Jon Krampner wrote Creamy and Crunchy, a history of peanut butter. In the New Yorker, Jon Michaud summarized and reviewed it. Here's how two of the three major brands developed:
The
Shifters was a name of a group of young people who called themselves
that for a few months in 1922. Some considered them a subset of
flappers, but men were welcome to be Shifters. Newspapers covered the
group as if they knew what the culture meant. No one knows who started
the fad, and there was no organization behind it. And, like many fads
among young people, the Shifters died out as soon as the media paid
attention to them. It was a sort of "secret society" of cool, hep people
"in the know," but we still know rather little. One of the fascinating
things about the Shifters was their method of recruiting new members.
