BATON ROUGE - Mosquitos carrying the West Nile virus have become the main target of the East Baton Rouge Parish Mosquito Abatement and Rodent Control.

 
The mosquito is called the most dangerous animal in the world because it spreads diseases like malaria, yellow fever, the Zika virus and West Nile.

Scientists at LSU and the crews at the parish office of mosquito control are seeking ways to fight them. 

This week, the mosquito control crews took their planes out to spray synthetic pyrethroid. 

"The southbounds area, and we were focusing primarily on an area around City Park, and the sweet olive cemetery area just around 22nd street." Assistant Director Randy Vaeth said. 

WBRZ visited their headquarters Thursday to see their planes and how they spray synthetic pyrethroid. The planes allow the department to treat eight to ten thousand acres in just 40 minutes. 

The pyrethroid they spray is not like your regular ant or wasp spray. It's designed to only kill mosquitos that are in the air at the time that it is dropped.

The planes also have a spot where the chemical is released.

"The plane has atomizers on the wings that create tiny droplets that stay suspended in the air for a considerable time. They drift through the spray block we create and it contacts a flying mosquito." Vaeth said
Over at LSU, they're studying a flavor compound of grapefruit called nootkatone as a mosquito repellent. 

They discovered it when they were studying termite repellent. They looked at 25 compounds and found that nootkatone was the most potent one. They soon tested it on cockroaches, fire ants, ticks, fleas and and it repelled all of them. 

Then they tested it on mosquitos, having a scientist put his arm in a box full of mosquitos. They put regular mosquito repellent on one arm, and a solution of 5 percent nootkatone on the other. After six hours, the nootkatone was still going strong while the mosquitos were biting the arm with the regular repellent.

"The problem is it's too expensive. So it costs about $3,000 a kilogram, so that's like almost $1,500 a pound, and so that's too expensive to use as insect repellent." LSU Professor of Biochemistry Roger Laine said.
Then a chemist and an LSU grad student developed a method to chemically synthesize the compound to make it cheaper. 

If the compound does become cheaper, it could become commonly used as a mosquito repellent. Nootkatone is also used in perfume as well, but those can cost hundreds of dollars on average.