Transcript of AE 1065 - The Goss: Going to Biological War with Mosquitos

G'day, you mob. Pete here, and this is another episode of Aussie English. The number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English. So, today I have a Goss' episode for you where I sit down with my old man, my father, Ian Smissen, and we talk about the week's news whether locally down under here in Australia or non-locally overseas in other parts of the world.

Okay, and we sometimes also talk about whatever comes to mind, right. If we can think of something interesting to share with you guys related to us or Australia, we also talk about that in The Goss'. So, these episodes are specifically designed to try and give you content about many different topics where we're obviously speaking in English and there are multiple people having a natural and spontaneous conversation in English.

So, it is particularly good to improve your listening skills. In order to complement that, though, I really recommend that you join the podcast membership or the academy membership at AussieEnglish.com.au, where you will get access to the full transcripts of these episodes, the PDFs, the downloads, and you can also use the online PDF reader to read and listen at the same time.

Okay, so if you really, really want to improve your listening skills fast, get the transcript, listen and read at the same time, keep practising, and that is the quickest way to level up your English. Anyway, I've been rabbiting on a bit, I've been talking a bit. Let's just get into this episode, guys. Smack the bird, and let's get into it.

What's going on, dad? How are you going?

Hey, Pete.

What's the goss'? How are your stitches? Are they healed yet?

"How are the stitches?" Well, the answer in terms of people when they are listening to this is probably, I hope so. But the real answer is, they're about two hours older than when we first introduced the topic.

So, mosquitoes.

Mosquitoes. Mosquit- What do we got? We got mosquitoes, snowshoe hares, and...

We've got heaps of stuff. But we can do the mosquitoes one because I've got to...

Do mozzies.

Yeah, mozzies, mozzies, mozzies. It's funny. It's one of those words in English that comes from Portuguese, mosquito.

Yes, it comes from the Mosquito Coast down in what was a Portuguese colony, now part of South Africa. Originally, I think that was where the word got translate- Transferred into English from, but.

That's the first place that someone was like, man, these bugs are fucking annoying.

...What are they called? Mosquitoes? Oh...

This is the place, yeah, we'll just name them after the place.

Yeah, exactly.

Oh man. So, yeah, new Australian research could help eradicate the spread of mosquito-borne disease.

Yes.

So, it's funny when they say this. I'm always like, disease. Okay, so this can either be immeasurable or it can be a measurable noun. So, you don't know, are they saying a single disease, and then they're going to be like, by the way, it's Zika virus? Or do they mean diseases in this, the immeasurable noun of just "disease"...?

Generic...

...Mosquito-borne disease.

Yes. The- In this case, it's a particular set of diseases that are carried by Aedes aegypti, the, you know, probably the mo- Other than the mosquitoes that cause- Well, and cause, they carry malaria, which is Anopheles, the Anopheles genus, different from this one.

They are the most common mosquitoes in the tropics that carry various things like dengue fever, yellow fever and Zika virus, which are the three most famous ones. And yeah, so it was a cool little research project in this case where these researchers found a bacterium that would sterilise male mosquitoes. And so, they infected a million male mosquitoes and let them out in the wild. And within a year, they had full eradication in those areas of mosquitoes because mosquitoes live a few days...

Yeah.

...They hang out, mate, lay eggs...

And it's only the females that bite you, the females are the ones that need to load up on blood because they use it to...

...Produce eggs.

Yeah. So, I looked this up, and it is the Wolbachia bacterium that they're using, and it does it through cytoplasmic incompatibility. I was like, because I hate when these articles introduce this, they're like, yeah, we just use this bacterium to make these male mosquitoes infertile. And you're like, how...?

How do they do that? But they're never going to go into the science, are they?

Well, yeah...

It's a 200-word article in Australian Geographic.

But it's here, cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI) is a phenomenon that results in sperm and eggs being unable to form viable offspring. The effect arises from changes in the gamete cells, so the sperm or the eggs, caused by intracellular parasites like Wolbachia, which infect a wide range of insect species.

As the reproductive incompatibility is caused by bacteria that reside in the cytoplasm of the hosts cells, it is referred to as cytoplasmic incompatibility. So yeah. And in 1971, a few people from UCLA demonstrated the aetiological relationship of Wolbachia infection and cytoplasmic incompatibility in Culex mosquitoes when they found that eggs were killed when the sperm of Wolbachia infected males fertilised infection free eggs.

So, that's how they've effectively given this bacteria, they've infected these mosquitoes with this bacteria that gets into the cytoplasm, which is the liquid that is inside of each cell.

And then when the sperm fertilises eggs of females in the wild, it kills the eggs and makes them inviable, so that the- I think what actually happens is that the- I think something weird happens where the gametes obviously can't join together to then turn into a- Is it a blastocyst? The embryo and everything.

So, really, really interesting how you would never think that you look into this biological pathogen or something in one species, and you can then use it to eradicate a pest species, which is carrying these diseases, which are a problem in Australia and many other parts of the world.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So- Yeah, so it was just a really interesting story that's come up and looking at it in this specific case, this may well help cure the world rather than individuals of, you know, some of those tropical diseases.

The more interesting thing is going to be, is it translatable over to other mosquito genera, the Anopheles one because malaria is still, I think it is still the world's biggest killer. More people die of malaria than anything else.

Well, that was what I was going to get on to. But to finish this bit up, over 40% of humans suffer from mosquito spread diseases, so it's an opportunity for Australia to develop environmentally friendly mosquito control tools to tackle current and future mosquito incursions. This is Dr Larry Marshall, who I think had something to do with running this study.

So, by working with Australian and international partners, we can tackle two of Australia's greatest challenges at once, health and security, with breakthrough research translated into effective global export solutions.

CSIRO is leveraging great Australian science to create new technologies to make this approach more cost effective and suitable for climates of less developed countries that suffer most from mosquito-borne diseases, strengthening and protecting our region. Let me just- Some fluff on my head making sure that wasn't a spider crawling over my head.

Head fluff. Yeah.

Yeah, so it was really cool. And it came, I think, on the back of an article. I think this was from last week. The WHO recommends a ground-breaking malaria vaccine for children at risk. So, a recent vaccine has come out and is being used in sub-Saharan Africa, and they're using it to hopefully immunise children against malaria.

Now, what's malaria again, as a sort of biological-? It's a plas- What's it called again?

Plasmoid or...

Yeah, I've forgotten the name of it. It's not a bacteria, it's not a virus. It's a different kind of...

Single celled organism.

Yeah, that gets in and screws up your blood cells effectively. And so, I think it's the first version of a vaccine that's targeting something...

Plasmodium.

...That, yeah, Plasmodium. It's the first vaccine targeting a Plasmodium. And it's an interesting one because I think, so the studies have shown that the vaccines, you know, not harming children, it doesn't have any of these nasty side effects or anything. But it only causes something like 30% to 40% reduction in severe malaria.

So, obviously, there are some issues there with how you trick the immune system into fighting off a plasmoid or Plasmodium like malaria in comparison to a virus or something like a, you know, bacterium. But it's the first step towards vaccinating the world's population against malaria. Because I think it's 800,000 children get malaria every single year, and I think it's 260,000 that die from it. So, it is significant. It's crazy.

Yeah...

260,000 under the age of five, yeah, die from malaria annually.

Yeah, if we can, we as humanity can deal with the mosquitoes, which are the vectors, the carriers of the Plasmodium in this case, then that's a much easier solution. It's a much cheaper and long-term solution than having to continually vaccinate people...

Yes.

...And in the end, vaccinations are by their very nature because they're just stimulating the natural immune system in our body. They need to be, you know, we have to keep working on them to keep ahead of the evolution of the problem organism, so. Whereas if we can just say, well, we can just effectively sterilise mosquitoes and once they've all gone, they've gone, then that's a better solution.

You just have to hope that you're not knocking something out of the ecological food chain that has unforeseen effects, right. Because you may find out that, okay, mosquitoes are a serious problem for humans, but they're actually a benefit to humans indirectly, because all these other animals...

...Particular species of fish feeds on them, and that fish is a food source for a fishery industry as an example. I mean, I'm just making that up, but yes, you don't want to create the cane toad problem.

Yeah. Though, yeah, I can imagine that any negative side effects, especially of knocking out...

Yeah. Knock out...

...Takes out malar- That is responsible for, you know, a quarter of a million children dying in Africa under the age of five every year.

And that's just Africa. Yeah. That's, you know, worldwide, malaria is a problem through the tropics...

Well, I was shit scared of it.

...Problem in Australia, and it disappeared in the 1940s or 50s, I think, so.

I was terrified of it when we were going into the forests of Sulawesi in Indonesia, because I was just like, Jesus mosquitoes everywhere here. Like, I'm sure...

Yeah.

...Going to get something, and you hear horror stories. I think one of the guys that we had- We were doing some work with there had had four different kinds of malaria, something crazy.

He was like, yeah, I've had malaria multiple times, and they're the different kinds like the haemorrhagic, the fever, the one where you, you know, crap blue. He was just like; I've collected them all like Pokemon cards because he did so much work around the tropics.

Yeah. Well, your uncle has, yeah, my sister's husband, he has malaria. And once you've got it, you've got it. You don't get rid of the Plasmodium; it just sits in your body. And, you know, eventually if you get some- It can recur...

It's kind of like HIV, right? Where it sort of hides in a certain area, right? And then you can have these bouts where it comes back out and...

Yeah, if your immune system gets knocked off by some other disease for a while, then it'll, you know, oh, we'll stop fighting that one, we're fighting this one over here and all of a sudden, a Plasmodium goes, shhhh, let's get out there and reproduce.

Well, and that's it. So, we don't have malaria in Australia because we don't have those mosquitoes, but.

Yeah, and we got rid of them. We used to have malaria in Australia, far north Queensland...

Oh, really? I didn't know that.

...Until the 1940s or 50s, I think and I'm not sure how. I suspect, given the timing of it, I suspect it was probably Americans during the Second World War and going, we're not getting bloody malaria here...

Yeah.

...We're going, deforestation or something to get rid of mosquitoes, but. I actually- It's a little research project that I should do is to go, how did malaria get, you know, get out of Australia? And it wouldn't have been common...

...That's crazy.

Yeah, far north Queensland.

Too funny. All right, well, that's probably enough for this episode, guys. Thanks for listening and we will see you in the next one.

Buzz off.

Yeah. (bug noise)

Alrighty, you mob. Thank you so much for listening to or watching this episode of The Goss'. If you would like to watch the video if you're currently listening to it and not watching it, you can do so on the Aussie English Channel on YouTube. You'll be able to subscribe to that, just search "Aussie English" on YouTube.

And if you're watching this and not listening to it, you can check this episode out also on the Aussie English podcast, which you can find via my free Aussie English podcast application on both Android and iPhone. You can download that for free, or you can find it via any other good podcast app that you've got on your phone. Spotify, podcast from iTunes, Stitcher, whatever it is.

I'm your host, Pete. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope you have a ripper of a day, and I will see you next time. Peace!