Shaw's Eco-Logic

Great science will always trump junk science—eventually. My latest HND piece looks at novel biological warfare techniques against the mosquito, mankind's greatest enemy in the animal kingdom.

Those new methods, of course, represent the great science. The junk science was all the Rachel Carson inspired nonsense about DDT, that set the fight back a few decades.

It seems that a bacterium called Wolbachia, which infests 60 percent of all insects, can wreak havoc on mosquitoes, and also prevent them from being infected with dengue and malarial pathogens. Another tactic is to interfere with the mating process, that only occurs once in a lifetime for most mosquitoes.

To be sure, these are wonderful natural approaches, but they must be used in conjunction with—and not instead of—the tried and true techniques of insecticides and knocking out the breeding sites.