Sixty seconds on . . . dengue

This is good news. A three year randomised controlled trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine , showed that releasing mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia reduced the incidence of dengue fever by 77% and dengue hospital admissions by 86%.1 It’s a bacteria that occurs naturally in 60% of insect species but not in the Aedes aegypti mosquito, the main source of the spread of dengue. Researchers worked out how …