Killer Mosquitoes

COLLEGE PARK, Md.--A Soviet magazine recently charged that a University of Maryland-affiliated Laboratory in Pakistan was conspiring with the Central Intelligence Agency to spread yellow fever and other diseases in neighboring Afghanistan.

Report of the disease-carrying mosquitoes circulated the globe earlier this month alter the Soviet magazine "Literary Gazette" contended that the CIA was funding a project to use radiation and genetic science of breed the pests. The Gazette added that several persons had contracted yellow fever after having been bitter by strange mosquitoes. The Diamondback, the university's campus news paper, reported this month.

But university officials denounced the claims, with John Dennis, dean of the university school of medicine in Baltimore. Saying. "That's a lot of hogwash Mosquitoes only fly a few hundred yards from where they were raised--even with a strong wind," added Dennis who has visited the Pakistan Medical Studied in Lahore, where the parasites were allegedly raised.

Dennis admitted that the laboratory is using low intensity radiation but said it is to produce sterile male mosquitoes, rather than diseased ones. The laboratory is practicing genetic science by breeding female mosquitoes with the sterile males in an effort to deplete the population he added.

A Pakistan scientist who befriended the literary. Gazette reporter was recently fired because he "was either a communist of the trend of a communist." Dennis said. The research at the Pakistan laboratory is funded by U.S. federal agencies, primarily the National Institutes of Health and U.S. Aid for International Development--not the CIA Dennis added.