GM Mosquitoes caused Zika virus outbreak?
The Aedes aegypti mosquito is known to transmit the virus
Zika has the dubious honour of having recently been declared a global public health emergency by The World Health Organization (WHO [2]).
Where did Zika come from?
“The Zika virus outbreak currently gripping the Americas could have been sparked by the release of genetically modified Mosquitoes in 2012,” reports The Mirror. “The insects were engineered by biotechnology experts to combat the spread of dengue fever and other diseases and released into the general population of Brazil in 2012… The Aedes aegypti mosquito sub-species that carries both the Zika virus and dengue was the type targeted with genetically modified mosquitoes.”[1]
What went terribly wrong?
As pointed out in this fantastic article by AntiMedia.org, the genetic engineers running this massive open-air experiment with mosquitoes and humans failed to consider the impact of antibiotics in the environment caused by their heavy use in agricultural (animal feed) operations.
As AntiMedia reports:
Only the male modified Aedes mosquitoes are supposed to be released into the wild — as they will mate with their unaltered female counterparts. Once offspring are produced, the modified, scientific facet is supposed to ‘kick in’ and kill that larvae before it reaches breeding age — if tetracycline is not present during its development…
According to an unclassified document from the Trade and Agriculture Directorate Committee for Agriculture dated February 2015, Brazil is the third largest in “global antimicrobial consumption in food animal production” — meaning, Brazil is third in the world for its use of tetracycline in its food animals. As a study by the American Society of Agronomy, et. al., explained, “It is estimated that approximately 75% of antibiotics are not absorbed by animals and are excreted in waste.” One of the antibiotics (or antimicrobials) specifically named in that report for its environmental persistence is tetracycline.
The presence of antibiotics causes the mosquitoes that are supposed to die off to survive and reproduce. These same genetically engineered mosquitoes may then bite humans, injecting them with the Zika virus that’s now causing horrific mutations in head and brain formation in children.
Children born with microcephaly
As more reports of deformed children keep appearing, the media is freaking out, the CDC is freaking out and the U.S. government is freaking out, demanding urgent calls for yet more vaccines. Alarmingly, the very same scientists who pushed for the release of the genetically engineered mosquitoes that may have caused all this are also now calling for MORE GENETICALLLY ENGINEERED MOSQUITOES which they claim will solve this problem.
It is sad, irresponsible and “unscientific” that none of the testing with GMO mosquitoes took place in the presence of tetracycline or other antibiotics that are now ubiquitous in the environment due to heavy use of drugs in factory farm operations.
No GMO or other human-engineered solution should be released in the “wild” without sufficient testing that it is totally safe for humans and the environment. History should be a good teacher in this respect.
How many “introduction experiments” went wrong even before GMOs?
Truth is, we don’t know for sure. What we know is that so many went wrong…
Introducing species from one habitat into another has shown to often have consequences far farther-reaching than it had anticipated. Many species were unwittingly transported from one continent to another along with travellers, in other cases, in other cases species may have been introduced as a kind of pest control. The problem with this is that it sometimes works SO WELL that it creates serious problems. An often-cited examples is that of the cane toad.
cane toad
The cane toad is native to South and Central America, but when its introduction to regions of Hawaii, the Caribbean, and the Philippines to fight pests in sugarcane fields yielded impressive results, it was quickly imported to various other regions worldwide (e.g. Queensland).
Unfortunately, cane toads have a nasty habit of not just eating crop pests and insects, but also just about any terrestrial animal that they can fit their grotesquely huge mouths around — which is saying something, given that they can grow to over 30 cm in length. They also secrete toxins capable of killing just about any animal they come in contact with (humans have died after ingesting their eggs)
Here is a list of the 10 of the world’s worst invasive species [3, 4]
Risk of “Unexpected Consequences”
Now, with GMOs and GE-species, the potential for “unexpected consequences” is much bigger than before. As we have seen, previous attempts to model the ecological consequences of the introduction of a species, have often failed miserably (when it was done at all – if you don’t do a proper feasibility study, ALL consequences are going to be unexpected!).
Until someone works out how to RELIABLY predict all the consequences of introducing a new species into an environment (or a new gene into an organism), we really have no business going ahead and just “hoping for the best”. THAT would be the least scientific route.
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