Mutant Mosquito Breeder Inaugurated In Brazil To Fight Dengue Fever

Mutant Mosquito

A breeder for a mutant mosquito has been inaugurated in Brazil in hopes of finding a more effective way to combat dengue fever, a disease that has already struck more than 430,000 people this year nationwide.

Brazilian authorities inaugurated the so-called "mosquito factory" on July 7, which will breed 4 million genetically modified Aedes Aegypti mosquitoes yearly.

The facility cost 1.7 million reais ($850,000) to build and was financed by the government of Bahia state with the help of the Health Ministry.

The mutant mosquitoes will be let loose in the future in a medium-sized city in order to test the real impact of the experiment based on techniques already tried out by English scientists.

The process has been tested successfully in the small city of Juazeiro in central Bahia state, where the number of  Aedes Aegypti mosquitoes dropped by 90 percent in six months, according to official estimates.

Aedes Aegypti mosquito is the vector for transmitting dengue fever, an illness that affects between 50 and 100 million people in the tropics and subtropics each year, causing fever, muscle and joint ache as well as potentially fatal dengue hemorrhagic fever and dengue shock syndrome.

With report from the Fox News Latino