- Ahhh, the beginning of summer. Longer days, warmer weather, and mosquitoes. If you're anything like me, or really any normal person on this planet, you hate mosquitoes and their nasty little bites. Mosquitoes are no joke. Worldwide, malaria alone kills over 400,000 people a year. While in the US we don't have to worry about malaria anymore, mosquitoes can still spread West Nile, dengue fever, chikungunya, and most recently, Zika. So managing these flying grim reapers is a big deal. There are even whole government agencies dedicated to keeping them in check. It's usually an all hands on deck type of situation where we just throw everything at them. We turn over buckets to reduce water breeding grounds, we spray pesticides, we release soil bacteria to kill their eggs, and we even drop mosquito larva eating fish into the water where they can breed. And now, some scientists are even taking it to the next level and going after the mosquito's DNA. The British company Oxitec has come up with a new weapon against these tiny tormentors. It's none other than genetically modified versions of the mosquitoes themselves. They've been engineered to carry a gene that causes the mosquitoes to produce too much of a certain protein, which ends up killing them. So for the first time in the US, scientists are itching to release these mutant mosquitoes for a trial run in everyone's favorite state to hate, Florida. I'm just playing, I got love for Florida. One of our producers is from there.

- Hi guys!

-The scientists are looking at Monroe County, this little section of paradise, and more specifically, Key Haven. This place is home to over 40 different species of mosquitoes, and the residents here are divided on the trial. While the media covered the pros and cons of this approach, a small but vocal group kept bugging out on a lot of the media coverage.

- We don't have enough risk assessment.

- We don't wanna be lab rats.

- We are humans and we don't like being treated like guinea pigs.

- So how risky are these mutant mosquitoes really? Alright, so the species we're talking about is the Aedes aeqpti. They're the ones that carry Zika, chikungunya, and dengue fever. Originally from Africa, they're invasive to Florida. And these guys are nasty. Well, it's actually not the guys. It's the ladies who are the nasty ones. They're the ones that bite you, spread diseases, and reproduce like crazy. And while these little buggers make up only a small percentage of the mosquitoes in the Florida Keys, they're really hard to control. They thrive in residential areas, that makes it easier to bite people, and they can breed in the littlest bits of water. For the trial, the plan is to release the modified males into the wild, remember the guys don't bite. They'll mate with the wild ladies. Then in a couple days, they'll die. But before they do, they'll pass that killer gene onto their babies. Once those babies hatch, they'll die before they even become adults, so they don't even get the chance to reproduce. I just wanna say that that's like the saddest line I've ever read in Above the Noise history. So that sounds good in theory, right? But does it work? Oxitec has done a couple of trials in Brazil, Panama, and the Cayman Islands, which ended up reducing the mosquito populations. And it's not just the companies saying this, their results are published in a peer reviewed science journal, which means outside scientists have looked at the data and given it the thumbs up. We talk about peer review journals in this video right up in there. What about the risks from the mosquitoes? Well I'm glad I asked. Before this goes to trial the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, has to give it the okay. They concluded that releasing these modified mosquitoes in Key Haven would not harm people, other animals, or the environment, and in case you were wondering, they ruled out the possibility of these mutant mosquitoes passing their modified DNA to humans. You can read the whole 158 page report, there's a link in the description. But there's still some people who are against the trial. Critics want more peer reviewed research before exposing the public to this experiment, and some advocacy groups like Friends of the Earth and Center for Food Safety have even threatened to sue the FDA. They claim the FDA didn't do a good enough job laying out the risk, especially the impact the mosquitoes could have on threatened and endangered species. And then there are others who have ethical concerns. They think we should not be messing with the DNA of animals. Period. Okay, so if the FDA says it's safe, but a group of people in the community aren't happy about it, what do you do? Well, the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District decided ask the voters. They put two measures on the ballot. One for all of Monroe County asking if, in general, people are in favor of a trial somewhere in the county, and another measure just for Key Haven. Monroe County residents voted yes, while Key Haven residents voted no. So Key Haven is out. Now Oxitec and the Mosquito Control District are looking for a new location for the trial in Monroe County. And they'll have to go through the approval process all over again. This means no modified mosquitoes anytime soon. But this has raised some really interesting questions. How do we know when a new public health technology is safe? How would you weigh potential risk of the modified mosquitoes, versus the risk of getting a mosquito borne disease? Let us know in the comments below. Thanks for watching, and if you like this video, make sure you check out our other ones, tell your friends to check out our other ones, and then you guys can all subscribe together to the channel to watch all the videos. And side note, if you're super into mosquitoes, you should check out our friends at Deep Look, another PBS Digital Studio show produced by KQED, and they did this awesome video on mosquito bites. So check that out, and thanks for watching.