
“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.