Experts pitch their plans for killing mosquitoes

Florida Keys Mosquito Control District leaders want to load up an arsenal of tools to combat mosquitoes that carry new and old diseases.

It’s not just Zika virus they’re concerned about, which causes flu-like symptoms and smallerthan-average brains in infants, but the possibility of an outbreak like dengue or yellow fever in the Florida Keys.

Last week, at a workshop in front of the Mosquito Control Board, experts and scientists working on methods for mosquito control talked about their projects, like male bugs sterilized through gamma radiation, bugs infected with natural bacteria and genetically modified bugs.

Each method has the same goal: To sterilize males and release them to mate with females that produce eggs that never hatch. This lowers the population of disease-carrying bugs, they say. through gamma radiation starting in 2019. A colony of locally collected bugs is kept on the property of Lee County Mosquito Control, where they feed on chickens and mate, he said.

The X-ray machine has not arrived yet, but once it does, male mosquito eggs from the colony will be put in a pupal separator, then run through the X-ray machine to be sterilized. It’s the gamma rays that sterilize the bugs.

“We can sterilize 200,000 pupae at one time,” Hoel said, and the males would be released to mate with wild females and produce eggs that never hatch. doctors because of bacteria that may be riding on the backs of the mosquitoes, seeing as how bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics after exposure to too much or too little. The surviving bacteria can become even more powerful and resistant to medicine down the road. last year,” Jimmy Mains of MosquitoMate said, adding South Miami’s trial will be about seven times as intense as the one done in the Keys last year.