Cyprus battles disease-carrying mosquitoes by breeding them with irradiated, sterilized ones

Cyprus is battling an inflow of disease-carrying mosquitoes by bringing in a whole bunch of 1000’s of the bugs after being sterilized via radiation.

The battle is primarily targeted on eradicating the Aedes aegypti number of mosquito that has been present in giant numbers within the island nation’s coastal city of Larnaca.

Cyprus’ Environmental Well being Companies head Herodotos Herodotou informed The Related Press on Wednesday that the Aedes aegypti has been particularly focused to stop its potential migration to continental Europe.

The hassle can be focusing on the Aedes albopictus mosquito on the island, which is extra widespread in Europe.

Each varieties can transmit to people harmful illnesses comparable to dengue, Zika and yellow fever, in addition to West Nile virus.

Herodotou mentioned that his service collects and dispatches each kinds of mosquitos—each eggs and grown bugs—to laboratories in Italy and Austria the place they’re bred and separated into female and male.

The male mosquitos are then sterilized by being uncovered to ionizing radiation on the Worldwide Atomic Power Company headquarters in Vienna.

About 100,000 mosquitoes are then introduced again to the island each week in order that they are often launched at particular areas and instances for breeding after they’re fed. The mating will not produce any offspring and consequently, the mosquito inhabitants diminishes.

This system, which has additionally been tried in different European nations together with Italy and Greece, will proceed till the top of the yr, in line with Herodotou. This system’s price is primarily borne by the Worldwide Atomic Power Company.

The advantages of this system is that authorities will not must resort to doubtlessly dangerous pesticides to eradicate the pests.

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