Genetic engineering may help control disease-carrying mosquitoes

EVERY YEARCRISPR-C, hundreds of millions of people catch mosquito-borne diseases like malaria and dengue fever. Hundreds of thousands die. Drug treatments are imperfect. And, despite decades of effort, vaccines have, for many of these diseases, proved tricky to develop.Better, then, to stop those infections happening in the first place, by exterminating—or at least suppressing—the mosquitoes that carry the diseases. In a paper just published in the , a team of researchers led by Craig Montell, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, describe how , a new and powerful genetic-engineering process, could help to do just that.