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posted by janrinok on Thursday September 22 2016, @04:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the a-splat-is-no-longer-enough dept.

Aedes albopictus is an early riser. Of the fifty-one mosquito species in New York, albopictus—a close cousin of Aedes aegypti, the species responsible for spreading Zika—prefers to restrict its activity to power breakfasts, in the mornings, and to teatime, in the late afternoons. (The common house mosquito is active in the evenings.)

On a recent afternoon, Mario Merlino, the assistant commissioner for New York City's Bureau of Veterinary and Pest Control Services, and Zahir Shah, the director of the city's Medical Entomology Laboratory, jumped a small fence inside Bellevue South Park, in Kips Bay, and wandered into the shrubbery. Shah pointed to what appeared to be a black collapsible laundry hamper, hidden behind a bush. "There it is," he said. "Our pride and joy."

The new trap is cylindrical and shiny, with sides made of black fabric and a white plastic top. If you were a mosquito, you might find it good-looking—especially compared with regular mosquito traps, which resemble buckets. This is intentional. According to Shah, albopictus prefers "attractive visual cues."

Regular traps release small amounts of carbon dioxide, to mimic humans breathing. The albopictus lure is more sophisticated: it releases a bouquet of substances commonly found on human skin, like ammonia and lactic acid, which are present in sweat and breath. The mosquitoes come to feast, and get sucked in. Shah unscrewed the trap's bluish-white lure and took a whiff. It smelled like a hot subway car during rush hour. "Whoa," he said. "It gets me every time."

[...] Two floors down [in the laboratory], Jie Fu, a research scientist, oversees testing. First, she feeds a tube's worth of mosquitoes into a machine that grinds them into a gelatinous glop. "It's like when you make mashed potatoes," she said. A machine called the BioRobot (imagine a convection oven) separates out the RNA and dollops it onto rectangular plates, which later go into a machine called an amplifier (imagine an office printer). Two hours afterward, the results appear on a small screen. "See?" Fu said, pointing to a bunch of squiggly lines. "No Zika." She added, "Albopictus is slowing down. It doesn't like the cold."

As part of the larger effort to educate New Yorkers about Zika, the health department has been promoting a hot line that people can call to report incidents of standing water: puddles, brimming gutters, birdbaths. The police department was the first to benefit: before the hot line, people used to call 911 to complain about mosquitoes. "They'd say, 'Quick! I have mosquitoes! Do something about it!' " Shah said. "Well, we're doing something about it."


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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 22 2016, @06:40AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 22 2016, @06:40AM (#405047)

    Forget about viruses, it's terrists you should worry about. Fifteen years of fear are not enough. Continue being afraid. You might have seen yesterday's episode of Mr Robot. An FBI agent said they passed the Patriot Act and you don't have rights anymore. That's funny because an FBI agent told me that 15 years ago. It's such a fucking cliche it's on mainstream TV and everything. NOTHING CHANGES YOU STUPID MOTHERFUCKING FUCKERS BE VERY AFRAID OF TERRISTS LIKE ME!!!!!! BE AFRAID!!!!!!! AND FUCK YOUR MOTHER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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