Being born in Fresno California I have been following this project for 
several years. Google has bought the small start up that was pioneering
the approach, the use of Wolbachia, a common bacterium, to infect males 
so that females lay sterile eggs. The project involves a mosquito
that recently invaded California's central valley and makes this an 
ideal test site since there is no symbiotic relationship with other parts of
the local ecosystem. As well, there is strong evidence that mosquitoes 
are simply pure predators, and are not an integral part of other
biosphere processes, so their eradication, or near eradication, in 
malaria zones, should have zero side effect consequences.


  Why [and how] Google Is Killing Off Fresno California’s Mosquitoes

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/why-google-is-killing-off-fresno-s-mosquitoes-1.1174742

Kristen V Brown, Bloomberg News

Mature mosquitos are seen inside a protected container in the mosquito 
factory at the Verily Life Sciences LLC lab in South San Francisco, 
California, U.S., on Thursday, Oct. 18, 2018. Photographer: David Paul 
Morris/Bloomberg

Mature mosquitos are seen inside a protected container in the mosquito 
factory at the Verily Life Sciences LLC lab
in South San Francisco, California, U.S., on Thursday, Oct. 18, 2018. 
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg ,

(Bloomberg) -- Silicon Valley researchers are attacking flying 
bloodsuckers in California's Fresno County. It's the first salvo in an 
unlikely war for Google parent Alphabet Inc.: eradicating mosquito-borne 
diseases around the world.

A white high-top Mercedes van winds its way through the suburban sprawl 
and strip malls as a swarm of male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes shoot out of 
a black plastic tube on the passenger-side window. These pests are tiny 
and, with a wingspan of just a few millimeters, all but invisible.

“You hear that little beating sound?” says Kathleen Parkes, a 
spokesperson for Verily Life Sciences, a unit of Alphabet. She’s 
trailing the van in her car, the windows down. “Like a duh-duh-duh? 
That’s the release of the mosquitoes.”

Jacob Crawford, a Verily senior scientist riding with Parkes, begins 
describing a mosquito-control technique with dazzling potential. These 
particular vermin, he explains, were bred in the ultra-high-tech 
surroundings of Verily’s automated mosquito rearing system, 200 miles 
away in South San Francisco. They were infected with Wolbachia, a common 
bacterium. When those 80,000 lab-bred Wolbachia-infected, male 
mosquitoes mate with their counterpart females in the wild, the result 
is stealth annihilation: the offspring never hatch.Better make that 
79,999. “One just hit the windshield,” says Crawford.

For the rest of the article go to: 
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/why-google-is-killing-off-fresno-s-mosquitoes-1.1174742

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