Excitingly, while dengue is the focus of this work, Wolbachia has also been shown to work against yellow fever, Zika virus and chikungunya.
Already in Australia's far north Queensland, dengue has been basically eradicated thanks to the World Mosquito Program's Wolbachia trial.The lab results showed that only 67 people (or 2.3 percent) in the intervention clusters where Wolbachia-carrying mosquitoes had been introduced had clinically diagnosed dengue fever, compared to 9.4 percent of people (318 cases) in the control clusters
The study also found that 86 percent fewer people who lived in intervention clusters ended up in hospital as a result of fever: 13 hospitalizations compared to 102 in the control areasIn far north Queensland, Australia, it only took four years for no dengue transmissions to be recorded following the release of Wolbachia mosquitoes in the Cairns region;Â however, it's worth noting the disease was never endemic there