The yellow fever virus is back, and this time it has returned with a vengeance which could see it wreak havoc across the Asian mainland, crippling the world's most populated region.
As America's top spy, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, said in February, genetically-modified mosquitoes are essentially a weapon of mass destruction and are quickly becoming one of the deadliest threats to the American way of life. Mr. Clapper's comments coincided with reports that the Zika virus which is currently culling the population of Latin America is the brainchild of Oxitec, a British company currently releasing millions of genetically-modified mosquitoes in Brazil and Central America on a weekly basis.
Although Mr. Clapper publicly told the American people that mosquitoes could be used as a weapon of mass destruction only this year, the United States Army has been experimenting with the lowly mosquito as a weapon to wipe out entire populations and cities since the 1950s, going so far as calculating how many cents it would take to kill one person with weaponized mosquitoes carrying yellow fever and conducting experiments over populated areas in Georgia.
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| Cost-effective way to kill. US Army |
In 1981, the US Army declassified a shocking report, detailing how the deadly yellow fever virus was dispersed over populated areas using airplanes, and calculating the exact cost of "attacking a 7.5 km² area (battalion) with yellow-fever infected mosquitoes."
With a mere 225,000 mosquitoes, the US Army calculated that an entire battalion could be wiped out, and this today represents the fractional capacity of a single Oxitec factory.
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| Cheap tool of eugenics. US Army |
At a mere 29 cents per person ($1.63 in today's dollars,) the US Army calculated that it could use yellow fever to kill 625,000 people using these so-called "entomological weapons."
The United States Army believed that there was an "entomological warfare gap" with the Soviet Union, and thus invested heavily in using mosquitoes as a weapon to disperse yellow fever and other deadly viruses.
This new strain of yellow fever ravaging currently Angola is particularly scary, as it could potentially make its way to Asia, which has surprisingly not had an outbreak of the untreatable killer.
The fact that this new outbreak of yellow fever is concentrated in Angola, a place with a large number of Chinese expatriates, means that China is extremely vulnerable. As the dispute in the South China seas escalates, we may see yet more weaponized viruses crippling entire populations.
