In Ethiopia, there is a factory for the production of tsetse flies

In Ethiopia, in the suburbs of Addis Ababa, built a factory for the production of tsetse flies. It's part of the plan for total extermination of flies dangerous in the country.

Back in the 30s of the last century, the Soviet geneticist Serebrovskii offered an unusual way to control insect pests. According to his idea, it is necessary to plant masses of male insects, sterilizing them to X-ray irradiation and release into the wild. Competing for females with normal males, they win just their numbers, and their mating with females of any offspring will not, and the species gradually dies out. We have to try this idea did not (genetics was not honored), and in the US with its help successfully eliminated meat fly in Japan - pests of melons, Chile - pest of apple orchards in the Netherlands - pests onion.

Tsetse flies, distributed in 35 countries in Africa, suffers diseases caused by single-celled organisms parasitic trypanosomes - a disease of cattle and sleeping sickness revolver. Nagano annually kills at least a quarter of the African cattle. In the year 50-70 infected with sleeping sickness of thousands of Africans. Vaccines do not exist (as Nagano), highly toxic drug (kill 3-10% of patients). With fly quite successfully fought insecticides and pheromone traps. But on the island of Zanzibar Serebrovsky method used, and in 1994-1997 the island was completely free from flies.

This example has attracted interest from the Government of Ethiopia, and it has allocated 12 million US dollars to build factories flies. Now the factory for a week makes 10 thousand males sterilized by gamma rays, and soon its capacity will grow by 70-100 times (construction of new housing). Bred flies fed the blood of cows, which is obtained from the slaughterhouse and frozen for storage. For the experiment, chosen the valley area of ​​25 thousand square kilometers. The first results are encouraging.

Source: www.nkj.ru

via factroom.ru