A laboratory near the Spanish city of Valencia is breeding and sterilizing thousands of tiger mosquitoes to help combat a climate change-spurred expansion in Europe of the invasive species that transmits dengue fever and other tropical diseases. Using an electron accelerator, the regional government-funded Biological Pest Control Center sterilizes male mosquitoes to release about 45,000 of them every week so they would pair with females -- the ones that bite and can transmit diseases between humans -- and eventually reduce the mosquito population. The specimens for reproduction come from the region, and scientists then use a sex sorting machine to separate larger female pupae from male pupae, before turning to radiation to make the latter sterile. Data from the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control show a continuing upward trend in the number of cases imported from dengue-endemic regions, as well as an increasing number of local outbreaks of West Nile virus infections and dengue within Europe.
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