What If We Killed Every Mosquito On Earth? 

I got hospitalized with dengue some years back, and I have a childhood friend who died of dengue. Personally, I wouldn't mind a mosquito eradication.

Scientists: I used the disease to destroy the disease.

My dad was killed by West Nile Virus he caught from a mosquito bite - would not be sad to see every single mosquito in the world eradicated

I’m currently laying here in a hospital bed. For the past 4 days I’ve getting over high feavers because I got dengue… your video is good timing on my feed

Bro, a bug factory? I didn’t know we were allowed to be super villains now, Ight time to build a death Ray

"Primarily by spreading disease" - I'm scared to learn what their secondary method is

I was diagnosed with Chikungunya in 2015 and I've never been the same since, I develop a rare case of osteocondritis in my right ankle and left me unable to use my foot for two weeks and after the virus was gone the condition remained, making my ankle to swell and hurt really bad to the point where I couldn't firm my foot to the floor. Bare In mind I was 15 back then so my body still was developing and body cells are healthier. In the end after many MRI and many orthopedic doctor opinions, I got surgeries in 2021, 6 years later and the condition has disappeared ever since. The virus truly changed my everyday life. From doing sports everyday for hours to barely an hour before I had to take a rest because of my ankle. I'm grateful this matter is being tackled because I wouldn't want anyone to go through what I did almost 10 years ago.

You fooled me with the click-bait 😭. I was really expecting to know what if there are no mosquitoes

I'm a senior in high-school, when I first heard about this story I was in 7th grade doing a research project on mosquitoes. I'm really glad the plan is actually starting to take shape, hopefully it can go global and these pests can be a thing of the past. Literally just flying used needles, goodbye measles!

As someone who caught dengue fever in pandemic. Hearing this is very relieving. In my family, only my mom that has not caught dengue fever. Hope it stays that way

Interesting study. Next, you should do a video on what would happen if we killed every mosquito on Earth.

I had hemorrhagic dengue in 2016, spent a full week hospitalized. If this program achieve success it'll be an awesome thing

Bro, i was watching from Brazil and when you said that mosquitos are the deadliest animal on earth i just heared one in mu ear, my soul left oit pf my body

This is Nobel prize stuff, THIS IS A HUGE DEAL

Glad you put this video out, I’m not sure when I ever would have heard of this project otherwise. This is an incredibly cool thing they’re doing

I hope that this can continue to help people. I had a relative that was brought to the ICU because of a severe dengue and I would say it was one of the lowest point in my life because of stress, on top of that I was also hospitalized at the same time because of mild dengue fever as well.

Metal Gear Solid 5 explored the idea of Modified Wolbachia spreading through vocal chords. Good to hear that in the real world it's being used for good

They did that in New Caledonia in 2019 (on a way smaller scale, probably when it was still an experiment) and it totally work, going from 3000-4000 case of dengue each year to 2 in 2022 (which were imported by tourist who came back from Bali). The bad side is that for people around the mosquitos drop, you got more mosquitos around you, they can still bite you (whitout anymore risk though) and it's advised to not kill them as they are suposed to overtake the regular mosquitos population. But it's just a little bad moment that can avoid worst moment after that :)

I have been following this for years and it is literally so incredibly fascinating. Highly recommend looking into this if you are even the slightest bit curious!

As someone prone to mosquito bites living in a malaria infected country, ive been waiting for the mosquito-pocalypse my whole life.

I live in brazil and i hope demgue rates go down but also, i dont wanna have billions of extra mosquitos in my country

Can they do this with Lyme and alpha-gal infected ticks? Please?

I was diagnosed with dengue/fever when I was around 10 years old (around 2009), in Medellin, Colombia (Aburra Valley) the same place where this video talked about. I have been able to see first hand the declines of dengue related sickness and deaths. The mosquito program has been an incredible and clever way to stop the spread of this virus, often affecting low income families.

This is amazing, one of the most interesting videos ever produced by ASAP Science.

These people are real life superheroes. I hope more people will dedicate their time to being this helpful

Singapore has been employing this technique as early as October 2016! To great success too, though they only release male Wolbachia infected mosquitoes in order to reduce the mosquito population.

Watching this while recovering from dengue. I hope these solutions help with this problem here in brazil, we are currently having a dengue epidemic and it is not fun at all

please do a full podcast on this!

Hello from Brazil! Glad to see people talking about what our scientists are developing. They deserve more recognition (over here, mainly)!

What If We Killed Every Mosquito On Earth? A full video on why they are adding more mosiquitos and nothing to do with killing any mosquitors.

Hello Colombian here that lives very close to Medellin (Aburra Valley). I didn't know we had that project, but it makes sense because there are no longer as many campaigns to prevent Dengue outbreaks. What is really amazing is that last year I had dengue and had to go to the hospital because of it, good to know im one of the 4%🤦‍♀️

Here in Argentina we are experiencing a kind of mosquito epidemic. The number of cases has increased by x10 since the last year, so this progress seems brilliant and necessary here.

How about we make mosquitoes not bite us

I like Metal Gear Solid V, hearing Wolbachia brings back memories.

you're unnaturally animated, facial-expressions-intense & jolly. topic is the only thing that keeps me watching

Learned a lot, brilliant 😊❤

Fascinating experiment in Brazil! It's refreshing to see a potentially effective and ecologically responsible solution to address the deadly disease-spreading mosquitoes. Kudos to the scientists for thinking outside the box and betting on this unconventional approach. Looking forward to seeing how this pans out in the long run.

Wolbachia sounds like Wallechia. Given the tendency of mosquitoes to suck blood, I find this name similarity amusing. 🧛🏼

Great sharing, thanks

Great video! Btw, your graphic has a typo at 3:57. It reads dengea instead of dengue.

Will this create a selective pressure for resistance to the bacterium? Or, as infected mosquitoes can still reproduce (infected female, infected male and female), will there be no selective pressure for resistance?

I used to do dengue research, about 10 years ago, and Wolbachia was the talk of the town!

First time here😁...really good video keep it going

I like the idea, nice work 🥳

this is a tremendous moment for humanity and it's making me emotional to think about it

I had malaria as a child and it was a terrible time, fifteen years later and I still remember the feeling.

Great video, hope they can pull it at a massive scale and reduce those infections.

Singapore released them here and I believe the pilot program worked (although I got infected with dengue in my estate) thank you for your work male mosquitoes

Thank you for answering one of the random questions that's been stuck in my consciousness for 13 years.

You didn’t even tell us whether or not it was feasible like you mentioned early in the video! It was one of your research questions, I NEED TO KNOW 😭

Wolbachia mosquito are everywhere right now in Malaysia and Singapore

My city recently had a sudden rise on dengue cases, so seeing this makes me hope that it won't be happening too much again

wolbachia just waiting for the right moment, they waited for us to take the bait.

0:02 cool to know that now French Guiana is part of Brazil 🤣

I remember hearing something like that 5-7 years ago, happy to hear about it again!

I have known about the Wolbachia experiment like 8 years ago and its great to finally see some results.

If I remember right, I think they did this here where I live in Florida too. I remember something that releasing modified mosquitoes to combat zika

Terrifying and fascinating..😅

Why is this not a world wide headline?! This is incredible

The plot of MGSV thickens

I was screaming this got me so hyped up. Go science

*Everyone gangsta untill the virus mutates*

amazing video! hell yeah! science!

Very educational.

"You cant blow up earth! Its a protected habitat for mosquitoes!" Lilo & Stitch

Releasing 5 billion insects sounds like a story out of a 2000 year old fiction book

Wickedly awesome science!!!

I heard about that back in 2019, when I used to work at health department fromcmy city and thought that's really a cool idea to stop dengue from spreading

Wouldn’t this just push dengue to evolve into a more effective competitor of wolbachia, outcompetes wolbachia aaaand in turn perhaps be deadlier to humans

Sounds like the start of any sci-fi horror 😂

Nice topic video

I love this!! Thank you for posting!! Mosquitos are the worst! I always wonder in the back of my kind tho, if we keep finding solutions to disease(which I support), will it actually lead us quicker to extinction by overwhelming the planet with our population?

What could ho wrong with modified mosquitoes ⁉️

I think this isn't reducing the mosquito population very much- although Wolbachia isn't good for them it doesn't kill them off. But making sure it is endemic in the wild population reduces the viruses a lot. If both M and F have W, the eggs do hatch and bear W, so the intervention doesn't have to be sustained. Elsewhere I've seen it claimed that just a small set of species (six or so?) are responsible for almost all human infection, so selectively wiping out those might be worthwhile.

i have been waiting for this video . for centuries. myes

Sound like another good plot for Zomebie Apocalypse Movie.

Light: Human's ingenious plan, Pacifist mosquito plague Dark: Human's ingenious plan, Disguised mosquito plague

We’re looking at this problem all wrong! Not all mosquitoes bite! Only females from some species bite because their ovaries don’t fully develop during their adolescent stages, whereas the species that don’t bite have fully developed ovaries when they become adults. This disparity between the biting and non-biting species is why the biting species need to bite: they need the protein and nutrients from a blood meal in order to stay competive with the non-biting species. The solution? Genetically modify the biting species, helping them, so that their ovaries develop sooner negating the need to bite at all. Which solves the disease vector issues.

We need to research this for ticks as well

I've had this question in my head for years, living along the equator

Juergen Klopp a scientist???

1:06 then kill only those mosquitoes who bite

Imagine having a device that exterminates all mosquitoes in your proximity

For those that are concerned with more mosquitos around, I haven't read about this one, but past experiments here in Rio released male mosquitos, and male mosquitos don't bite humans.

Mosquitoes form an important source of biomass in the food chain-serving as food for fish as larvae and for birds, bats and frogs as adult flies-and some species are important pollinators. Geckos also need them for food . Without mosquitoes, thousands of plant species would lose a group of pollinators. Adults depend on nectar for energy (only females of some species need a meal of blood to get the proteins necessary to lay eggs that may lead to the death of many a plant species.

Brasil mentioned!!!!! 🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷

This is insane. It really makes me think about the complexity of the unknown. Science and the universe is just unbelievable.

Interesting fact about dengue which contradicts every available source I can find online is that, in American English, it has always been pronounced “deng” as one syllable which I have always attributed to an erroneous assumption that the etymology was Vietnamese.

They just forgot one thing: life finds a way

Great video despite having a bait/switch title.

alright, this video was the hypothesis time for the practical test

Bro, I love science. Scientists are so important. I wish we valued them more!

Dengue's very popular nowadays in our country😂😂😂

Idk about this. When humans start to mess with things too much shit always turns sideways. I hope that this keeps helping but fingers crossed causeeeeee

What an incredible bit of ingenuity

I suffered from dengue back in 2017. Worst feeling you can imagine. Took me about a month to fully recover. My weight dropped from 70 kg to 55kg. There are a lot of mosquitoes here in Karachi, Pakistan. The government should consider deploying these mosquitoes here too.

What about Malaria? Doea Wolbachia affect the malaria parasite the same way it affects dengue virus?

except mosquito larva are a keystone food source for so many ecosystems. especially in wetlands and swamps

These things used to eat me alive in florida and texas. I’m allergic apparently? The bumps get huge even if not scratched and they tend-to target me. Thankful I havent been bit in years and never got sick

What a counter intuitive solution to the problem. This reminds of a show from Tru TV, they would let hunters hunt already endangered rhinos in Africa for their horns in exchange for a high fee. This money would then be used to help preserve the remaining rhinos. This method was effective.