“Alphabet’s life sciences arm, Verily, says it has built a robot that can raise a million mosquitoes a week and has used it to produce infertile male insects. The company has started releasing the first batches of what will total 20 million sterilized mosquitoes in Fresno County, California.”
“Verily is using a line of modified Aedes aegypti mosquitoes—the species that carries chikungunya, dengue, yellow fever, and Zika viruses. Mosquito Mate founder Steven Dobson originally created the insects 15 years ago by injecting newly laid mosquito eggs with Wolbachia using a tiny needle. The infection has been transmitted through female mosquitoes ever since, so there’s no need to inject each new generation. Wolbachia, which has been relatively well studied as a mosquito-sterilizing technique, doesn’t infect humans and can’t be transmitted to humans through an insect bite.”
…and opioids aren’t addictive, cannabis has no medicinal value, while “anti-depressants” that stimulate suicidal thoughts are a good idea.
“What can go wrong?”
© 2026 – SoulSequel
12 responses to “This is somewhere between the X-Files & 12-Monkeys”
Wow! I hope something is done about the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes in California were the size of a dime and their bite only itched for 2 days and went away. The mosquitoes in Arizona are about the size of fruit gnats — teeny tiny little mosquitoes. However, their bites leave a lasting sore that itches like hell for about a week and leaves a scar that stays for a full year before fading. Anything that could get rid of the Arizona mosquitoes would be a great relief.
I don’t use opioids, cannabis, or anti-depressants. I am not depressed. I don’t get depressions —- except the kind that can be cured by hugs, kisses, and a Krispy Kream doughnut.
@ladybarbara
A lot of this is because of the human proclivity to travel. When you’ve lived in a region for generations, your family’s blood is already in the genetics of the mosquito population . . . plus your body has a chance to develop healthy reactions to the bite.
Move to a new area and you are “the caviar” to the biting insects there — plus your body doesn’t know now to react.
I worked outdoors at a camp in the area my ancestors had been in for generations. The biting insects were a pain, to be certain. But a relatively minor one. But the camp would attract kids and workers from literally all over the world. And the bugs would essentially leave the rather bland “meat-and-potatoes” of you alone . . . to go pester the extravagant foreign “caviar and deserts”.
And with a histamine reaction not groomed through generations of exposure, they would swell horribly and sometimes even suffer general body-wide malaise.
And as a survivalist for many years, I would notice that when I ate just foods indigenous to the area, the biting insects were even less interested in me. But start up with the “traditional” diet of foods imported from afar, and I was on their radar again.
@griz we ontarions know the rules, no bananas at night in mosquito season :D
@BelleMadre
That’s interesting! I had said something similar in my original post but erased it. I didn’t think most people would get it!
@griz @BelleMadre
I now officially declare the internationale boycott on Canadian Bananas to be in Full Effect, until such time where it can be proven that Canadian Bananas have nothing to do with depopulation.
@luftballooneyegouge
Say it isn’t so! Have you no humanity??
Just think of what that would do to the Canada banana farmers and the whole Canadian banana-export trade! So sad!!
What’s next? A boycott of all Puerto Rico’s Maple products???
@ladybarbara My Daily Theory is that these kind of shenanigans lead to the collapse of the culture to non-verbal levels of development, which leads to nature mixing with un-maintained pollution stockpiles of nuclear and chemical mutagens resulting in periods of dinosaurs and dinosaur sized creatures.
…pretty sure there’s humming-bird sized needle faced mosquitoes right around the corner, & it has something to do with Canadians and bananas.
Opioids are very addictive, and have become a huge problem in America.
Cannabis has plenty medicinal value, and has been used for thousands of years as a medicinal herb.
“Anti-depressants” that stimulate suicidal thoughts are never a good idea.
@immortal_pirate
Anti-depressants are a sticky wicket. We are so VERY driven to try to solve all our problems with a pill that does most or all of the work for us. So pharmaceutical companies make BILLIONS off meds touted to remove from us most of the toil of healing. They do it for us, in the background. And in some cases like antibiotics, they work just fine (as long as we don’t over-do them and create super-bugs while simultaneously degrading our own immune response! ) And narcotics help you get past the pain so healing is accelerated.
But the tricyclics (anti-depressants) are a different class of drugs that take up to a month to build up to sufficient concentrations to do anything. And by then who’s to say if the often minor changes in brain chemistry are a result of the drug . . . or would have happened naturally over time?
All drugs — including cannabis, nicotine and even caffeine — have a cost to using them. Costs that grow more dire with over-use, dependency and even addiction.
The problem is that we are not NEARLY so clever as we think we are when it comes to predicting unforeseen consequences of tugging on a thread in the interconnected web of life.
Our past history has shown us downright ignorant and dangerously arrogant when it comes to this. Yes. Some of our experiments into this work out fine. But the ones that haven’t, come with rather dire consequences — many of which are still in the works. (Think “Monsanto”!)
Yes, some mosquito bites make people sick. And some germs make people sick. This is definitely “hand sanitizer” thinking. Destroy all the germs that make our kid’s immune systems strong so they don’t have to bother developing an immunity.
What could possibly go wrong?!
Until Culex are acknowledged as Zika vectors and birds (esp. red-whiskered and red-vented bulbuls) are investigated as reservoir / amplifying hosts of Zika, nothing will change in Florida, Houston, or southeast Asia. These regions (and soon, southern California) will be hotbeds of infection for years to come.
I worried about those who work / live in the San Gabriel Valley region of Los Angeles county (use mosquito bed nets and be aware that nighttime-active Culex are prevalent there along with red-whiskered bulbuls).
What the WHO, CDC, and Health Canada failed to do was take to heart the evidence submitted by Drs. Ayres (Feb. 2016), Hunter, Guedes, Guo et al., Evans et al., and just recently Elizondo-Quiroga et al. (who found THREE species of Culex to be Zika vectors in Mexico, including Culex tarsalis).
No infected mosquitoes were collected from Yap States and French Polynesia during their Zika outbreaks. They simply ASSUMED that Aedes species were vectors, although they never fulfilled the criteria: Source: Dr. Walter S. Leal’s paper “Zika mosquito vectors: the jury is still out”.
Culex mosquitoes in Brazil, Mexico, Singapore, and other regions of southeast Asia are spreading Zika (which means birds are likely reservoir hosts). Bulbuls are a popular pet in southeast Asia. What’s worse: Wolbachia that is acquired by Culex / bulbuls after (or perhaps along with) a Zika infection is likely enhanced by Wolbachia.
Wolbachia can also make the Aedes species even MORE resistant to insecticides.
In fact, Wolbachia is responsible for the most widespread pandemics in the animal kingdom (LePage and Bordenstein, 2013). Safety tests were never carried out on vertebrate species prior to Wolbachia-infected mosquito releases (carried out in Brazil, Columbia, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, China, Australia, California, and Florida). It’s akin to putting genetic dynamite in a species.
Wolbachia can survive about a week in a dead host; Zika for five days. Lateral transfers to other species have happened. This could be (is probably) the reason that Zika is spreading out of control. Culex that naturally acquire Wolbachia are better vectors of malaria and West Nile virus (very similar to Zika).
My latest PSA:
@Rose Webster
…planetary immune system phenomena. The big ball’s fighting back!