[senortumnus]

Curious paragraph at the very end of the NYT’s article on this:

“ On average, it takes 28 flights per week to cover a 1,750-square-mile region, according to the state Food and Agriculture Department. To combat the Leimert Park outbreak, officials said they would divert two flights per week to target the affected neighborhoods.

Strict procedures are now in place to prevent another accidental release of fertile flies, Dr. Leathers said. “We really need to make sure there’s a lot more sterile flies out there, than the wild flies,” he said, “to make it more likely to work.””

Thats the end of the article. No mention of accidental release of fertile flies elsewhere in the article. Article burying the lede?

[CobrastanJorji]

They're presumably referencing a major fruit fly fuckup from back in 1981. In 1981, there was an outbreak of "medfly," the mediterranean fruit fly. It was a big economic disaster for California. The reaction was crazy. People were up in arms. The state started spraying chemicals on everything. But environmentalists were like "hey, um, maybe spraying a bunch of pesticide on everything isn't great" and the governor was like "yeah, I'm gonna not aerially spray everywhere." But then the Federal government stepped in and ordered we spread it everywhere. The medfly thing was bonkers. Years later, there would be a whole insane side plot where a terrorist "medfly breeders" group would send notices to newspapers that they were secretly breeding more medflies.

Anyway, during this insane hullaballoo, one of the alternatives to spraying that they tried was releasing a bunch of "sterile" male flies that they somehow got from Peru. I have no idea what Peru reportedly did to sterilize them (maybe they had a different breed?), but whatever it was was wrong, and California ended up dumping a few hundred thousand perfectly virile male flies out.

Here's an old news story about the accidentally fertile medfly thing: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/10/us/fertile-flies-released...

And here's a video about the general medfly California crisis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQfhZ1JYUDE

[taskforcegemini]

then chemtrails pretty much are real after all

[Johnny555]

I was wondering that too, the closest I could find was this (but was not fruit flies and not in the USA):

https://entomology.umd.edu/news/hunting-the-flesh-eating-scr...

One unique difficulty arose in 2003 when the radiation apparatus that sterilized screwworm flies malfunctioned, resulting in the accidental release of fertile flies in Panama. Although this was a significant setback in the screwworm eradication program in Central America, Dr. Welch and others from the USDA worked tirelessly to correct this error