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El Salvador Using Fish to Fight Zika Virus

To El Salvador now, where the Central American country is using a creative method to fight the Zika virus. Zika is spread through mosquito bites – it’s dangerous to pregnant women, due to the link to birth defects in newborns.

To combat the virus, El Salvador is employing the help -- of fish! Sambo is a kind of fish that eats the larvae of mosquitoes, stopping them from developing into adults that spread the virus. 

The fish are being distributed in El Salvador and placed in the water where mosquitoes are likely to lay their eggs. The community testing this method has not reported any cases of other mosquito-borne diseases like, dengue or chikungunya since 2012.

After hurricane Katrina, the same group supplying the El Salvador' fish helped avert an outbreak of West Nile virus in New Orleans by distributing fish that feast on mosquito larva to abandoned pools across the city.