Dengue fever is ranked by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the most important mosquito-borne viral disease in the world - and the most rapidly spreading - with a 30-fold increase in global incidence over the past 50 years. Current control strategies, including insecticide application, are proving to be either ineffective at controlling vector populations or prohibitively expensive as a long-term preventative approach, particularly in developing countries.

The Eliminate Dengue research program (www.eliminatedengue.com) is examining the use of inherited, naturaloccurring, bacterial symbionts of insects known as Wolbachia, as a novel method to interfere with dengue transmission.

Various Wolbachia strainshave been successfully transferred from their native insect hosts (fruit flies and mosquitoes) intoAedes aegypti and have been shown toreduce the susceptibility of mosquitoes to dengue viruses and other pathogens.

Our goal is to seed wild mosquito populations where dengue occurs, with Wolbachiathrough a controlled number of releases of Wolbachia infected mosquitoes that will then breed with the wild mosquito population. Once Wolbachia is established in the wild mosquito population it is predicted that there would be reduced transmission of dengue viruses between people.

Open releases ofWolbachiaAedes aegyptiin communities in northern Australia in 2011 resulted in the successful establishment of Wolbachia in the mosquito populations. Continued monitoring of the populations indicatethat Wolbachia has remained in these populations for over three years without any assistance. Further trials in Australia, Vietnam and Indonesia have been undertaken using various deployment methods and have shown that theapproach is acceptable to communities, regulators and other stakeholders.

Further field trials will develop and test scalable strategies for eventual deployment of Wolbachiamosquitoes over larger geographic areas, through which we will be able to measure the impact of the method on dengue transmission. If this research is successful, we anticipate that the Wolbachia based control method may represent a practical, environmentally sensitive approach to dengue suppression with the potential for area-wide implementation at low cost.