The World Health Organization on Tuesday urged Zika-battling countries to embrace new methods of fighting disease-carrying mosquitoes, including controversial use of radiation to kill generations of offending pests
“Given the magnitude of the Zika crisis, WHO encourages affected countries and their partners to boost use of both old and new approaches to mosquito control as the most immediate line of defense,” according to a WHO statement.
The outbreak has been centered in Brazil, other South American nations and the Caribbean, with the Zika virus spread by Aedes aegypti mosquitoes.
British biotech giant Oxitec is conducting the experiments in Brazil and the Cayman Islands to irradiate male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, leading to their offspring dying before they become adults and can reproduce.
Some environmentalists and scientists, however, worry about the slippery slope of eradicating this skeeter species — and perhaps others that also carry disease.
Mosquitoes, while always annoying and often disease carrying, also pollinate some plants and provide nourishment for various creatures up the food chain.
Still, others believe Aedes aegypti mosquitoes didn’t come to the Americas until very recently — perhaps as only in the 18th or 19th centuries, a blink in the 4,5-billion-year-old earth.
Therefore, some say, ecosystems might be able survive just fine without these disease carriers.
“This is an invasive species, so getting rid of these mosquitoes would, if anything, restore the natural ecology, not destroy it,” said Jo Lines, an instructor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and former WHO staffer.
The Zika virus has been linked to birth defects that include newborn’s being born with unusually small heads and eye damage.
An Argentinian environmentalist group had claimed that recent cases of these birth defects weren’t caused by ZIka but by the pesticide pyriproxyfen
But Brazilian health officials Tuesday rejected that claim and said the WHO has approved the use of pyriproxyfen.
With Post Wire Services