Is anyone reading this old enough to remember the ‘don’t fool mother nature’ commercials? They were margarine commercials where mother nature created havoc after someone tried to fool her. I don’t know about the margarine part, but I do know that we tamper with nature at our own risk. We have a large number of great white sharks off the New England coast because we are protecting the seals. I don’t think creating a feeding ground for sharks was the goal, but that’s where we are. Now some brilliant scientists are about to do something that defies the imagination.
On Saturday, The Gateway Pundit reported:
America’s most infamous tech company has a bold, potentially risky plan to supposedly reduce the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses, assuming the federal government will sign off on the proposal.
As The New York Post reported, Google wants federal approval to unleash approximately 32 MILLION mosquitoes into the states of California and Florida over the next two years.
This is supposedly part of an effort to halt the spread of several serious mosquito-borne illnesses, including West Nile virus, St. Louis encephalitis, dengue, Zika, chikungunya, and yellow fever.
The Google researchers particularly focused on West Nile and St. Louis encephalitis. The former is the leading mosquito-borne disease in the US and is widespread in California amongst local bird and mosquito populations.
…Rather than releasing biting insects, the company plans to release male mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia, a naturally occurring bacteria. When the infected males mate with wild female mosquitoes, the offspring do not survive, helping suppress mosquito populations over time.
Because only female mosquitoes bite humans, experts say the releases would not increase the number of biting mosquitoes.
Are these the same scientists who regarded kudzu as a beautiful, ornamental ground cover? Are these the same scientists whose hybrid silk worms got loose from the Museum of Science in Boston and became known as gypsy moths? You get the picture. Let’s not increase the mosquito population in order to decrease it. What happens if the mosquitoes find some way to adapt?