Mosquito Bioweapons: The History of Testing Inside the United States

Brandon Turbeville
Activist Post
December 26, 2011

With the recent announcement by UK-based biotechnology firm Oxitec that the company would be releasing thousands of genetically modified mosquitoes in Southern Florida as early as January, 2012, GM opponents, environmentalists, and a diverse group of Floridians have issued calls to suspend the experiment at least until further tests have been undertaken. Many are simply calling for informed consent protocol to be followed such as is required by law.

Yet, unfortunately, a great many of the responses to theGE (genetically engineered) mosquito release are missing the deeper agenda which is at work here. Undoubtedly, the sordid history of experimental tests involving mosquitoes, mosquito-borne illnesses, and uninformed and unwitting humans has been largely overlooked.

For instance, many of the articles I have read over the last few days dealing with this issue have made the claim that the release scheduled for early January would be the first ever of this type of experiment in the United States. This, however, is not the case; and considering the history of such testing — specifically that conducted via the release of mosquitoes — the American people should be very concerned.

I, myself, wrote a detailed article close to a year ago, entitled “Viruses and the GM Insect ‘Flying Vaccine’ Solution,” in which I chronicled the experiments that have taken place over the years both inside and outside of the United States involving mosquitoes and mosquito-borne illnesses, specifically Dengue Fever.

That being said, it has already been discussed in other recent presentations after my initial article in 2010 how, under the guise of eradicating Dengue Fever, GM mosquitoes were released into the environment in the Cayman Islands in 2009.

Dengue fever is a mosquito-borne, virus-based disease that has largely been non-existent in North America for several decades. Dengue Fever can morph into a much more dangerous form of the illness known as Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever. Symptoms of Dengue Fever are high fever, headache, pain behind the eyes, easy bruising, joint, muscle and bone pain, rash, and bleeding from the gums. There is no known treatment for Dengue Fever besides adequate rest and drinking plenty of water.

Generally speaking, it is one specific type of mosquito, Aedes Aegypti, which transmits the virus.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

The publicly given method for using these GM mosquitoes to eradicate Dengue Fever was that thegenetically modified mosquitoes were “engineered with an extra gene, or inserted bacterium, or have had a gene altered so that either their offspring are sterile and unable to spread dengue, or simply die.” More specifically, the male GM mosquitoes are supposed to mate with natural females which produce larvae that die unless tetracycline, an antibiotic, is present. Without the antibiotic, an enzyme accumulates to a level that is toxic enough to kill the larvae.

Read full article here

This article was posted: Monday, December 26, 2011 at 5:17 pm

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