SINGAPORE is in the midst of its worst ever outbreak of dengue fever, caused by a virus that attacks around 100 million people globally each year. A new approach to tackling the disease is needed, and that could be to infect the mosquitoes that carry dengue with a bacterium that shortens their lifespan.
Fighting diseases by attacking the insects that spread them is not a new idea. One trick that has worked against the tsetse fly in Zanzibar and the screw-worm fly in North America is to release billions of sterilised males to swamp the wild population. Almost all the…
