Current Status and Recent Achievements of the Sterile Insect Technique Program Against Dengue Vector, Aedes aegypti, in Indonesia

Abstract

Given the facts that Indonesia has suitable environment condition to survival, reproduction and development of the principal mosquito vector for dengue virus, Aedes aegypti, the transmission of dengue virus does routinely occur every year. The sterile insect technique (SIT) as one of the techniques in area-wide integrated pest management (AW-IPM) has been developed to control Aedes aegypti population since 2004. The first 5 years of the program (2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)) was focused on mass rearing facility establishment. The lab-work study for the entomological data and field trials were performed in 2010-2014. In 2014-2019, the program was addressed to enhance the mass rearing facility to increase sterile male production and strengthening the networking throughout the involvement in the regional and interregional program coordinated by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The main future challenge of the SIT program against Aedes aegypti is developing the capacity building and strong commitment of all stakeholders i.e. the Ministry of Health, the universities, the research institutes and the public. In the future work plan, the pilot project design to proof the concept of the SIT is strongly recommended to obtain a firm, unbiased and strong results as the consideration for the decision maker to create the Aedes control program in Indonesia.Journal homepage: http://aij.batan.go.id

Developing the radiation‐based sterile insect technique (SIT) for controlling Aedes aegypti: identification of a sterilizing dose

“…aegypti SIT studies. 11,20,21,29 We note that our unirradiated control treatments had many cages where there were <10 eggs per female. Given the usually high fecundity of this species and the fact that all of our measures are divided by the number of females in each cage starting at 50 females, we propose that a substantial number of females in each cage did not lay eggs in the first gonotrophic cycle.…”

“…One thing that stands out about our study is the relatively low numbers of eggs that were laid by each female in our trials compared to some other Ae. aegypti SIT studies 11,20,21,29 . We note that our unirradiated control treatments had many cages where there were <10 eggs per female.…”

“…aegypti in the field. [18][19][20][21][22][23][24] Here we describe baseline investigations that we conducted to develop an operational SIT program targeting Ae. aegypti in the city of St. Augustine, St. Johns County, FL, following a phased conditional approach similar to that of Bouyer et al (2020).…”

“…Since the 1970s little effort had been devoted to developing SIT in mosquitoes until recent efforts have shown that both radiation‐based SIT and the conceptually similar Wolbachia ‐based incompatible insect technique (IIT) can be highly successful at population suppression of Aedes albopictus and Ae. aegypti in the field 18–24 …”

Gamma-Irradiation Reduces Survivorship, Feeding Behavior, and Oviposition of Female Aedes aegypti

“…Fortunately, the sterile insect technique (SIT), an approach proven successful for enduring control of other highly challenging insect species (Klassen and Curtis 2005), has been applied to the Ae. aegypti control problem in Indonesia (Ernawan et al 2019), China (Zheng et al 2019), experimentally in Mexico (Bond et al 2019), and with a series of experiments and operational trials based in St. Augustine, FL (K. Linthicum, R. Xue, and D. Hahn, unpublished data), and Lee County, FL (R. Morreale and D. Hoel, personal communications). The SIT leverages the mass release of colonyreared males that are sterilized, by ionizing radiation or chemosterilants, to compete with wild females.…”