which made them vulnerable, but which had the right climate to support mosquitoes. The Chemical Corps started to experiment with how a brigade of A. aegypti might be deployed and what sort of damage they might do.”
Concerted efforts began around 1900 to tackle the deadly problem of yellow fever, which was afflicting American troops carrying out imperialistic adventures in the Caribbean.
After discovering that the mosquito caused yellow fever, Americans led a successful eradication program in Cuba.
American scientists took their methods to Brazil, where Fred Soper – with the help of the authoritarian Brazilian regime – implemented a strict A. aegypti eradication program that succeeded in eight cities in northern Brazil.
“In 1947, the year Zika was discovered, he had convinced enough people that eradication was possible that a consortium of American countries endorsed a plan to rid the entire hemisphere of the mosquito.
“Most of the countries succeeded. By 1962, there were no A. aegypti to be found in 18 continental countries and a number of Caribbean islands. Only a few hold outs had failed to start programs to destroy these mosquitos. The one that made Soper the most frustrated was his own.”
When the U.S. Public Health Service finally began A. aegypti eradication efforts in the Southeast to combat yellow fever, the military was simultaneously studying their use as biological weapons against Communist countries.
As part of this research, Army scientists had to see how quickly A. aegypti populations spread through populations, so they released hordes of mosquitoes (uninfected by yellow fever) in American cities like Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida.
“They would load hundreds of thousands of mosquitos into planes and, later, helicopters, then drop them over the field and see how far they could spread.
“The mosquitoes apparently performed well enough: By 1960, the Chemical Corps was producing 500,000 A. aegypti every month, rearing them on sugar water and blood and letting them lay their eggs on paper towels.
“Scientists had found they could infect a new generation of mosquitoes with yellow fever by mixing the virus in the solution in which the mosquito eggs grew. Hundreds of thousands of mosquitoes were not enough to start a real epidemic, though.
“The corps proposed constructing a facility in Arkansas that could produce 100 million A. aegypti mosquitoes each week.”
In the same years, federal government was attempting to eradicate A. aegypti, the military was releasing countless numbers of the mosquitoes into the environment.
Yellow fever was not so much of a problem in the U.S. as it was in tropical regions, and the same authoritarian methods employed in places like Brazil could not be applied in the U.S. Funding and enthusiasm was also a problem, and it was becoming realized that true eradication was a pipe dream.
After being beaten back for a few decades, A. aegypti has now invaded more territory than it ever inhabited before. And scientists now say the species may be “more sophisticated, individually complex, and formidable than anyone imagined.”
Of course, we can’t blame the American military for the spread of the mosquito species largely responsible for the Zika virus and yellow fever, but the secret history tells us much about how these sorts of things are viewed by government.
Even as the world was battling against infectious disease, the military saw an opportunity to find more effective ways at killing people. And it used its own citizens as unknowing subjects for research.