NEW ORLEANS — Fluorescent rodent feces, a promising new mosquito repellant and a better flytrap are all part of a war on bugs designed to protect U.S. troops around the world from disease.
The Pentagon’s Deployed Warfighter Protection Research Program backed testing that secured recent Environmental Protection Agency approval of an insecticide spray that is highly toxic at low doses to adult mosquitoes but safe for mammals.
Now Navy Corpsman Joe Diclaro II is taking aim at the housefly, and the many disease-causing organisms they carry. “I like to think of it as a death device,” Diclaro said of a fold-up flytrap designed to ship flat and be rolled into bug-catching tubes in the field.
For starters, he changed the color of the trap.
When Diclaro released house flies in a dark tunnel between boxes lit in different colors, he found flies prefer blue or white over yellow, the color of most traps.
So his trap is made of blue signboard. Tests show it has killed about 3,000 flies in 24 hours.
The fluorescent feces are being used at Louisiana State University to learn whether sandflies can be killed by feeding sand rats a chemical harmless to the rodents but lethal to larvae that eat their feces.
Leishmaniasis, which causes disfiguring open sores and is spread by sandfly bites, is an enormous concern in the Middle East, White said. The disease infects an estimated 2 million people a year, according to the World Health Organization.
More than 2,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered from the disease, an Agriculture Department official said.
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