Trump orders DC mosquito purge
Por Ellie Borst — POLITICO – TOP Stories
President Donald Trump wants mosquitoes gone from the “swamp,” and has given EPA a push to fast-track approvals for bioengineering projects aimed at Washington.
Trump signed an executive order Tuesday directing EPA, the Interior and Agriculture departments, and the General Services Administration, in consultation with the Department of Health and Human Services, to reduce, by 2028, Washington’s invasive mosquito populations by at least 90% and its tick population by at least 50%.
EPA is tasked as the lead for a regulatory framework that considers “sterilization techniques, safe genetic modification, and use of safe, beneficial bacteria.” The agency is also ordered to move quickly to “register novel tick and mosquito control methods or products,” so long as EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin finds them “to be both safe and effective.”
The order authorizes Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to launch a prize competition to develop new treatments for tick- and mosquito-borne diseases, as part of his “Lyme Disease Moonshot” initiative, which is “subject to the availability of appropriations.”
The order — another instance of the president’s close oversight of day-to-day life in the city he now calls home — comes as EPA faces a pile of permit requests from biotech companies for various types of “mosquito birth control.”
Perhaps the largest applications awaiting EPA approval comes from tech giant Google’s “Debug Project,” which aims to sterilize male mosquitoes with a bacteria called Wolbachia. Google’s experimental use permit to test the bacteria on the Asian tiger, or aedes albopictus, mosquito, the species that dominates Washington, is still pending after the public comment period closed in May.
Google is also testing the bacteria on the Egyptian, or aedes aegypti, mosquitoes, the strain most notorious as the primary transmitter of Zika, chikungunya, dengue and other deadly viruses.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai was among a group of tech executives at the White House on Tuesday to sign a voluntary agreement “self-policing” their artificial intelligence products. Google’s press office did not immediately respond to questions.
Zeldin in May emphatically rejected a viral online claim that EPA authorized a mass release of genetically modified mosquitoes as “ENTIRELY fake news!”
Mosquito birth control tools exist, with controlled trials in states, including California and Florida, showing signs of success. The Interior Department, for another example, has looked to use sterilization techniques to save an endangered bird species in Hawaii.
Kennedy has long treated ticks as personal territory, circulating baseless rumors about Lyme disease as a bioweapon created in a U.S. military lab. Congress late last year authorized more investigation into the origins of the bacterial infection with long-lasting health effects.
Trump’s order gives the agencies 60 days to build their campaign and framework on how they plan to reach the 2028 deadline. EPA is also expected to decide on the permits from Google and other biotech companies in the mosquito birth control business — namely Oxitec and Synvect — soon.
Ariel Wittenberg and Kevin Bogardus contributed to this report.
Fonte: POLITICO – TOP Stories
