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This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Cynthia Graber. This will just take a minute.

Mosquitoes carry nasty diseases—dengue fever, west nile, malaria¹. But the microbes that cause those diseases don’t attach themselves to the mosquitoes and then immediately latch² onto their next victim. They need time to grow and replicate³ in the mosquito before migrating to the bug’s salivary⁴ glands⁵. For example, the dengue fever virus takes about two weeks to incubate.

So researchers from the University of Queensland in Australia and Central China Normal University are looking at a way to shorten the lives of mosquitoes—and thus curtail⁶ their disease-transmitting ability.

Researchers worked with a bacterial⁷ parasite⁸ called Wolbachia that infects numerous insect species. They spent three years adapting it to infect the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which carries dengue fever. It cut the lives of the mosquitoes by more than half. Those results were reported in the January 2nd issue of the journal Science. The scientists say that because Wolbachia shortens a mosquito’s life, the insects are that much less likely to pass on the diseases they carry. So a relatively⁹ inexpensive and effective human disease prevention program could be to mass-infect mosquitoes with Wolbachia. Which should make the medical community buzz.

Thanks for the minute for Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Cynthia Graber.