Chikungunya is a relatively rare form of viral fever caused by an alphavirus that is spread by mosquito bites from Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, though recent research by the Pasteur Institute in Paris claims the virus has suffered a mutation that enables it to be transmitted by Aedes albopictus (Tiger mosquito). This was the cause of the plague in the Indian Ocean and a threat to the Mediterranean coast at present, requiring urgent meetings of health officials in the region.
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Setback for anti-malaria mosquitoes - Telegraph
Scientists who developed genetically altered mosquitoes to combat malaria admit today that they have suffered a setback.
Mosquito strains engineered to attack and kill the malaria parasite could offer a new way to fight a disease that infects up to 300 million people a year, killing about one million, mostly children.
However, a laboratory study has found that current lines of GM mosquitoes do not compete well against normal mosquitoes, and the introduced genes disappear within 16 generations.
Nevertheless, the team from Imperial College London and University of Perugia, Italy, says GM mosquitoes still offer hope against malaria.
The team reports today in the journal Science that the most likely cause of the problems is inbreeding created through crossing the descendants of a single transformed individual, and that the introduced gene is likely to become associated with one or more deleterious mutations.
A possible solution is to use breeding strategies that avoid inbreeding and to release larger populations of modified insects to ensure survival of adequate numbers.
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Avian influenza (also bird flu) is the collective term for influenza from viruses adapted to birds. Sometimes the term is mistakenly used to refer to specific Influenza A subtypes, or to the specific viruses that cause the disease (see Virus versus disease).
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Featherless chicken
Scientists at the genetics faculty at the Rehovot Agronomy Institute near Tel Aviv, Israel have created a mostly featherless chicken by cross breeding a broiler (which are the big, meaty ones) with a species that has a featherless neck. The idea behind the de-velopment of this ugly thang is that it will create a more 'convenient' and energy efficient chicken which can live in warm countries where feathered chickens don't do well and cooling systems are too expensive to be commonly affordable.
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My question is could these and other similar experiments be the cause of the above mentioned diseases?
Thanks all in advance for your inputs.
Linear Mode
