Fish, GM insects join Zika fight

Playa San Diego ( El Salvador), Feb. 10: With larva- chomping fish and genetically modified insects, Latin Americans are deploying legions of little helpers to destroy mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus in the world’s latest mass health scare.

Scientists are devising numerous ways to try and stamp out the mosquitoes whose bites spread the virus, which they suspect can cause brain damage in babies and paralysis in adults.

Some want to wipe out baby mosquito larvae in standing water where the insects breed. Others propose to zap the male mosquitoes’ privates with radiation to make them impotent.

Still others just want a plain old toad in their home to gobble any mosquitoes that buzz in.

In San Diego Beach on the Pacific coast of El Salvador, fishermen use fat sleeper fish to devour the mosquitoes while they are still wingless larvae.

“They are true warriors in the fight against Zika. They eat all the mosquito larvae in the barrels where we store our water,” said Rafael Gonzalez, 30, a local fisherman.

In Colombia, the second worst- hit country in the Zika outbreak after Brazil, scientists are fighting mosquitoes with mosquitoes.

Tropical disease specialists at Antioquia University are trying to spread among mosquitoes a bacteria known as Wolbachia, which blocks their ability to pass on disease to humans.

“No one is really thinking they can eradicate the Aedes Aegypti mosquito completely. The aim is to keep its numbers so low that it does not pass on the illness,” said the director of the project, Ivan Dario Velez.

Teams in Brazil and Panama meanwhile are experimenting with male mosquitoes that are genetically modified in such a way that when they mate, the resulting larvae die off.

In Mexico, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Yukiya Amano, said the agency was testing the use of radiation in stopping the mosquitoes breeding.