Efforts to control mosquitoes take on new urgency
The major mosquito spreading Zika virus has quirks that make it one of the toughest to fight
SCIENCE VS. MOSQUITO Geniuses at growing in tiny containers of water, larvae of Zika-spreading mosquito Aedes aegypti dangle head down at the water’s surface.
© Alex Wild
Brazil, now a poster child for mosquito-borne virus spread, was once a model for mosquito eradication.
“It was amazing,” says Dan Strickman, medical entomologist with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Aedes aegypti mosquito, today identified by epidemiologists as one of the carriers of the Zika virus, was attacked in the 1930s with the simple tools then available. By 1965, the mosquito was certified as eradicated from Brazil and 17 other countries in the Americas (but not the United States). The feat took ferocious effort, but as the threat dwindled, so did money and the political will to stay vigilant.
Whether eradication would even be possible now is unclear. But the question of how to cope with Ae. aegypti has taken on new urgency as that mosquito species sweeps Zika virus through South and Central America and into parts of North America. Known as the yellow fever mosquito, Ae. aegypti can also spread dengue,
