00:00In September, Portugal released 30,000 mosquitoes in Lisbon.
00:03But these were no ordinary mosquitoes.
00:05They were specially treated sterile males released into the environment
00:09as part of an effort to reduce the population of the Asian tiger mosquito.
00:13They were just irradiated with radiation, so they became sterile.
00:19And when female mosquitoes try to mate with a sterile male mosquito,
00:24they don't give an offspring.
00:26It's a technique that Portugal has now used for a second time
00:29as authorities try to prevent the spread of mosquito-borne diseases
00:32such as dengue, chikungunya and Zika.
00:34The problem is that a lot of people are coming from their vacation back to Europe,
00:39from Thailand or Brazil or places where we have these tropical diseases,
00:43and they bring those viruses with them.
00:46And then they get bitten by a local mosquito,
00:49and that local mosquito bites someone else and infects someone else,
00:54and then you have a local outbreak.
00:56And we have seen an exponential increase of these types of cases.
01:01This year, by the end of October, 76 locally acquired cases of dengue
01:05were reported in Italy and eight in France.
01:08That's more than twice as many as last year,
01:10when 35 cases were recorded in France, Italy and Portugal.
01:13What we are concerned is that it could potentially go from this sporadic event
01:17that happened once in a while,
01:19that suddenly we see a situation where dengue is a persistent problem.
01:24The Asian tiger mosquito doesn't need to fly hundreds of kilometers
01:27to expand its territory.
01:28In fact, it typically travels only a few hundred meters on its own.
01:32But it has found another way to move, by hitchhiking.
01:35They can get into cars moving something like 60 kilometers per year,
01:38while the outbreaks of the diseases they transmit travel even faster,
01:42at 120 kilometers a year up north.
01:44That means more people could be exposed to diseases
01:46that local doctors are not necessarily used to diagnosing.
01:50You have people that come in to a clinic and they say,
01:53oh, I don't feel good.
01:54And then the first thing that the physician tends to do is,
01:57have you been abroad?
01:58But often you get an infection even if you haven't been abroad.
02:02That's why the European Union's Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority,
02:06known as HERA, invested 10,000 euros for the development of new diagnostic tools.
02:11Of course, we are also missing the right medicine to treat these new diseases
02:16that are coming to Europe.
02:17And that's why we are funding some researchers to develop new medicines,
02:24new therapeutics, antivirals.
02:26But we are also funding research for development of new vaccines.
02:30For now, Europe is still dealing mainly with imported infections
02:34and sporadic local outbreaks.
02:35But a combination of international travel, climate change
02:38and the continued spread of invasive mosquito species
02:41is creating new opportunities for these diseases to take hold.
