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This is the VOA Special English Health Report.

Dengue fever feels like a severe case of the flu, including pain in the muscles and joins. The World Health Organization says there may be fifteen million dengue infections every year. That are rare, fewer than thirteen thousand a year. A dengue has spread sharply since the nineteen seventies. The disease is sounded mostly in cities. WHO says forty percent of the world's population is now at risk in more than one hundred countries. Southeast Asia and western pacific are the most affected. Dengue is also found in Africa, the Americas and the eastern Mediterenian. There is no vaccine against dengue and no special treatment. Shcod Rich of James Cook University in Queen's land Australia, says control efforts target the moscatos that spred dengue.

And the only way to control it is to the use of pesticides and perhaps community education. And some of the moscatos are giving resistance to those pecticides, so we need something normal in different.

Something different is what he and other scientists from Australia and the United States are working on. They blocked the growth of dengue virus in moscatos by infecting them with a kind of bacteria called VobapiyaPipiantis. Vobapiya is commonly found in fruit flies and it's safe for people. The researchers released the

moscatosinfected with Vobapiya into an indoor test area filled with uninfected moscatos. The infected meeted with the uninfected ones and successfully spred the vacteria. The researchers then try their experiment outdoors. Over two month period, they released more than tree hundred thousand infected moscatos in two Australian towns far from large cities.

Schota Neo at Monesh University in Melbourne says the moscatos quickly infected wild populations just as they had in the indoor tests. And the must importantly once the release stop, and we back to continue to increase until the experiments come to conclusion at the end of the wet season. And about that time we can say that we have almost complete penertration of the Vobapiya infection into the moscato population of this sorts.

Next the plan is to do tests over the next two to three years in an area where many people are infected with dengue. Era Harfman at the university of Melbounre says the tests will show if the idea can actually prevent the disease.

We have xxx very helpful. And before we get to the stage we can say "hey, we are back again control dengue." That's a different matter. That's xxx of track.

The researchers described their work in two papers last week in the journal Nature.

And that's the VOA Special English Health Report. I'm Shelly Graphic.