Singapore unveils new mosquito facility in fight against dengue

SINGAPORE, Singapore — Singapore unveils a new mosquito breeding facility that will help the city-state step up its fight against dengue fever and other mosquito-borne diseases.

The facility’s automated devices will allow researchers to boost breeding of mosquitoes carrying wolbachia, a bacteria which reduces the insects’ ability to spread viruses.

Climate change is expected to worsen the spread of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue.

The National Environment Agency (NEA)’s facility will allow researchers to eventually increase their production capacity of Wolbachia-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquitoes by more than 10-fold.

The new facility has a target production capacity of five million male Wolbachia-Aedes aegypti mosquitoes per week.

Under Singapore’s Project Wolbachia, researchers release male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes carrying wolbachia to suppress the urban mosquito population. When the released mosquitoes mate with urban female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that do not carry Wolbachia, her eggs do not hatch. Continued releases are expected to gradually reduce the urban Aedes aegypti mosquito population, and hence lower the risk of dengue transmission.

Aedes aegypti is the primary transmitter of dengue, chikungunya and Zika in Singapore.