Before America Wanted To Eradicate Them, The U.S. Military Was Weaponizing The Zika Mosquito

8 August 2016 GMT Medical/Health,  War and Terror

‘The story of Zika-carrying mosquitoes gets even more interesting when we delve into history. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the U.S. military is involved.
An investigation by Sarah Laskow at Atlas Obscura found that in the 1950s, the U.S. was seeking to weaponize the Aedes aegypti mosquito while Brazil and other Latin American countries were trying to eradicate it.
At Fort Detrick, the military’s biological weapons base in Maryland, in great secret, Army scientists were considering how fleas, grasshoppers, and mosquitoes might be deployed against the Communist threat. These insects were harder to protect against than gas— masks wouldn’t help. The threat they posed would last, as long as a population of insects remained alive. Plus, it would be very difficult to pin an insect-borne attack on the U.S.’
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