Innovative Mosquito Factory in Colombia

I'm Scott O'Neill here in Medellin, Colombia today,

and I'm at the world's biggest mosquito factory for the World Mosquito Program.

We're making in here 30 million mosquitoes a week.

Come have a look.

We're doing it for a very serious reason.

Cities like Medellin have suffered from diseases like dengue,

Zika, chikungunya for decades, but not anymore.

We've been able to bring the solution of Wolbachia mosquitoes to this city.

When this bacteria called Wolbachia gets introduced into the mosquito,

it stops their ability to transmit dengue.

We release mosquitoes that have Wolbachia, and then they go and mate,

and Wolbachia gets passed into the wild mosquito population.

If we're going to control these diseases in all the tropical cities of the world,

it's going to require a lot of mosquitoes.

The mosquito life cycle starts with the egg, and in this room, we've got a lot of eggs.

Each one of these strips, these tiny black dots,

are up to 10,000 mosquito eggs.

Across all of these strips,

about one and a half million dried eggs waiting to hatch.

In this tray, we've got the newly hatched eggs.

They're little larvae, so small you can hardly see them.

They're going to sit in here for a few days and eat and get bigger,

until they look like these ones over here. They're starting to turn into pupae.

We're wanting to do the next step of sorting the males from the females.

We want to do that so we can manipulate the sex ratio in the cages to be more female than male.

The bottom ones along here are the boys, and the ones at the top are the girls. They're bigger.

From here,

they're going into the adult cages.

We have adults that we continuously grow in what we call our brood stock.

And then over here,

we have the mass-produced mosquitoes getting ready to give us the eggs to go out directly into the field.

It's crazy how they sound.

You might wonder, what do we feed all these mosquitoes here?

Well, I can tell you, we've got the good stuff in here.

On the top shelf, literally,

we've got the blood.

They love it.

Once the mosquitoes are grown, they're ready to go out into the field.

The first way is to get the eggs and package them in a gelatin capsule with food.

Voila.

There's 300 eggs in here and enough food for the mosquitoes to be able to grow.

They just need to be dropped in water.

The other approach is to take the adults themselves.

Here we have 300, and they can be released off the back of a motorbike.

Or even packaged into a drone for aerial release.

Over half the world's population is currently suffering or at risk of contracting these diseases.

We have a solution, and our goal is to scale and deliver it to communities around the world that need it.

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