Cuba lends Sri Lanka a helping hand with Dengue outbreak

Cuba

Two Cuban epidemiologists were in Sri Lanka in mid-August to lend a helping hand to the Health Ministry there in its ongoing tug-o-war with a Dengue outbreak, which had claimed 232 lives.

The Cuban experts first toured the country to assess the situation and presented the Sri Lanka Public Health Director, Palitha Maheepala, with a detailed report of how to tackle the Dengue outbreak using the bacteria, BTI (Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis), that the Cubans have been researching as part of their own bio-insecticide programme. BTI bacteria kill the larvae in Aedes aegypti infested waters.

Colombo has pledged to study the Cuban report before implementing its findings.

Source: prokerala.com

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Genome mapping of mosquitocidal bacterium completed

Chemical control has, rightly or wrongly, been the backbone of Vector Control programmes in the developing world. Consequently, chemical usage has outpaced the less invasive and relatively inexpensive methods of physical and biological control.  And even as insecticides engulf meagre Vector Control budgets and the mosquitoes continue to develop resistance to them, personal responsibility for the management of diseased mosquitoes remains low to insignificant.  How else is it that Dengue transmission has been escalating in the Caribbean and Latin America for the past two years running.

No wonder scientists, geneticists among them, have been working feverishly to come up with a solution to mosquito problems that do not depend on human action to be effective.

Enter researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Wuhan Institute of Virology (WHIOV), the CAS Beijing Genomics Center and the Cardiff University in UK.  They have succeeded in mapping the genome of the mosquitocidal bacterium Bacillus sphaericus C3-41, an “aerobic, mesophilic, spore-forming microorganism” as described by Sci Tech Space Astronomy.

Together with Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis, sphaericus has been at the cusp of modern approaches to mosquito control for two decades now.  The CAS findings may not be the end all of this scientific investigation, but it has added another link to the chain of studies on the subject, now and into the future.