by Anthony Gucciardi
Just when you thought genetically modified mosquitoes and mutated dinner entrees were the extent of biotech’s hunger to manipulate the genetic coding of the planet, scientists have now unleashed a plan to launch thousands of ‘frankenfly’ style insects into the wild in order to combat pests.
And just like we saw with the release of genetically modified mosquitoes, the altered insects are actually being pushed as a ‘green alternative’ to the use of chemicals. You see, British scientists claim that mutating the genetic code of the insects is actually a way of substituting for the use of chemical pesticides. Chemical pesticides used to lower the population of olive flies in Britain. The reality here, however, is that you are taking something damaging like chemical pesticides and replacing it with something far worse.
It’s like trading in your aging car for a bicycle, except in this case the bicycle also happens to include side effects like ‘may alter the genetic structure of the entire insect population’.
According to the Daily Mail, which dubs these insects as ‘frankenflies’ (and rightfully so), the frankenflies are meant to kill the offspring of the olive flies when the genetically modified flies mate with wild olive flies:
“The trial would involve releasing genetically modified male olive flies which would mate with the wild females with the result that all the female offspring would die at the larvae or maggot stage.”
In other words, they are actually trying to mutate the genetic code to sterilize and eliminate the population of flies. So what does this mean for animals that eat these flies as a part of their routine diet ? Or how about the humans that then eat these animals, or maybe even somehow eat the flies themselves? The Daily Mail goes on to state:
“However critics fear the development could put human health at risk if people eat the flies or their larvae if they reach food products.”
It looks like this legitimate fear doesn’t seem to stop (or even affect) scientists who insist on unleashing the genetically modified frankenflies into the environment at large. Perhaps their suggestion is to not eat any animal that may have consumed the fly, any plant that may have came in contact with the fly, and to stay indoors to avoid any physical contact with anything the fly touched?
Let’s stop the mad scientist ideology of bloated biotech corporations and instead return to an age of reality and reason.
SOURCE: http://naturalsociety.com/thousands-of-genetically-modified-insects-set-for-released/#ixzz2eDaeoQYd
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