Bite Back: Can We Win the Mosquito War?

Produced by Ee Mahmud and Hayley Torres Mosquitoes kill more humans than any other animal on Earth. They carry malaria, dengue, Zika, yellow fever, and more. And despite decades of scientific effort and billions of dollars spent, we are still losing. In this episode, Ee Mahmud and Hayley Torres trace the history of humanity's attempts to fight back. They follow DDT and the ecological disaster it left behind, genetically modified mosquitoes released over communities without their consent, Wolbachia bacteria introduced into mosquito populations with results scientists still cannot fully explain, and a drug discovered in 2025 that makes human blood itself lethal to the mosquito.But science is only part of the story. This episode asks who gets to make these decisions, who carries the burden when things go wrong, and who never gets asked at all. The mosquito did not create these inequalities. It exposed them.Featuring an interview with USC researcher Dr. Luisa Reis-Castro, this episode moves from the history of DDT to the cutting edge of genetic science, and ends with a centuries-old Indigenous story that asks a question Western science is still trying to answer: what if the mosquito was never something we could beat?Suggested Further ReadingRachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962). Penguin Books.Carson exposed what DDT was doing to ecosystems before anyone wanted to hear it.Wienhues, Anna (2021) ‘The Innocent Mosquito? The Environmental Ethics of Mosquito Eradication’ [book chapter] in Mosquitopia? The Place of Pests in a Healthy World edited by Marcus Hall and Dan Tamir. London: Routledge.A short piece that asks whether humans are actually justified in trying to wipe out an entire species. It reframes the mosquito as a victim of circumstance rather than an enemy.Reis-Castro, L. (2026). View of Can the Mosquito Bite? the Multispecies Transmutation of Wolbachia Mosquitoes as Biotechnologies of Epidemic Control in Rio De Janeiro. Engaging Science Technology and Society  https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/1555/939 The article by the researcher interviewed in this episode. It follows Wolbachia mosquito programs in Rio de Janeiro and looks at what it means to turn a disease carrier into a public health tool.Haines, L. R., et.al. (2025). Anopheles mosquito survival and pharmacokinetic modeling show the mosquitocidal activity of nitisinone. Science Translational Medicine, 17(791). https://doi.org/10.1126/scitranslmed.adr4827 The study that found people taking nitisinone for a rare metabolic disorder were accidentally killing the mosquitoes that bit them. The science behind one of the most surprising findings in the episode. Pests and Prejudice is a podcast series created by UCLA undergraduates in the spring of 2026.  Each episode is a story of a messy relationship, one in which people seduced pests, and then decided to break up with them... and it usually goes about as well as you would expect...