Sara Reardon, Scientific American
As soon as the rain stops, mosquitoes flood the guard house of an upscale tourist resort near Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. Without hesitation, one of the guards reaches under his desk to pull out a device that looks like a very large hair dryer. “Mosquito gun,” he says. He walks around, spraying a thick, white cloud of fumigant that engulfs the booth. Slowly, the mosquitoes disappear.
It’s not uncommon to see clouds of pesticide wafting through Cuba’s houses and neighbourhoods. It is largely because of such intensive measures by ordinary citizens that the country has been among the last in the Caribbean to succumb to local transmission of Zika. As of Augus 11t, Cuba has recorded three people who were infected by local mosquitoes rather than contracting the illness abroad, compared with 8,766 confirmed cases in nearby Puerto Rico (see ‘Zika in the Caribbean’).
