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 Posted by Sam Lanfranco <[log in to unmask]> Access CANCHID archives at: https://listserv.yorku.ca/archives/canchid.html . CANCHID is a constituency service to the Global Health Community and is managed by Prof. Emeritus Sam Lanfranco <[log in to unmask]>