Australia on alert for tiger mosquitoes

SOME mosquito species were found and killed in Townsville last week, in water that had pooled in tyres imported from Papua New Guinea.
Biosecurity authorities say efforts to stop a disease-carrying mosquito species from invading the Australian mainland are working but their success is not guaranteed.
Asian tiger mosquitoes have been detected at the Cairns and Townsville ports, in north Queensland, several times in the past year.
Tim Chapman from the federal Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry says the mosquitoes are aggressive and carry disease.
“That includes things like dengue fever and yellow fever and the other thing, too ­– unlike lots of mosquitoes, it’s active during the day time, so it wrecks barbecues,” he said.
“You’ve got a mosquito which can be around at all times of day and that is a potential carrier of disease and obviously the more we can keep things like that out of the country, the better.”
Chapman says officers are finding more of the mosquitoes than in the past.
“There’s a couple of reasons for that – I think we’ve got increasing trade from areas where these mosquitoes occur naturally,” he said.
“But also I think we’ve got better at actually detecting them and getting onto them quickly, so I think it’s something that we need to be aware of but it’s not anything to be genuinely worried about.” – ABC News