If you believe in a God you might think he had a bad day when he decided to unleash the mosquito on us.

It is completely useless but completely deadly.

It’s a shape-shifting, malevolent little creature perfectly built to resist man’s attempt to stop it causing carnage.

It adapts quickly to the drugs we develop to protect ourselves, even developing a taste for some of them.

I spent a year travelling around Peru and Brazil in 1988.

Words cannot express how much the mosquito is hated.

The very second the sun disappears you hear the first high pitch buzz of the insect coming out of hiding to feast on your blood.

It has been responsible for the death of millions around the world.

Just think of the names. Yellow fever, malaria and dengue.

Horrible viruses it carries that can cause a lingering end.

Now we must add Zika to that list.

A hideous cruel epidemic spreading out from South America that causes deformities – shrinking skulls in babies in the womb.

But there is hope if we are prepared to let our scientists play God themselves, give them a fair chance to fight the dark side of our natural order.

Let me introduce OX513A. Shall we call him Oxy for short? I came across him a few years ago in a scientific article and he’s back in the news today.

Oxy is a genetically modified mosquito developed by an English biotechnology company called Oxitec.

Oxy is a beautifully simple concept. He’s had his genetic structure altered to add a fatal gene.

Released in the wild to breed, his offspring will be killed by that self-destructing fault.

In an experiment in Brazil in 2011 aimed at combating dengue, disease-carrying mozzies declined by more than 90 per cent when Oxy was introduced.

He works and, what’s more, he’s probably the best bet against Zika, which is carried by the same kind of mosquito.

But now comes the problem. Poorly written reports suggest that Oxy might actually have been responsible for spreading Zika.

The idiotic stories, which actually mixed up the areas of Brazil in which the experiment and the outbreak occurred, spread across the web You can easily find the Daily Mail’s “Are scientists to blame for Zika virus?” story via Google. The answer to the Mail’s headline is an unequivocal “no”.

But that has not stopped a zealous coalition of green groups, religious fundamentalists and others attacking the science as unnatural with unforeseen consequences.

Researchers are indeed playing God, they exclaim.

This debate, which started over GM crops 20 years ago, is stuck in a loop.

Sooner or later we’re going to have to choose which side to back. The one which says “this is the way things are” or the other which says “we might be able to stop people suffering”.

Which God do you prefer?

The Argus:

A while back I told how I am hooked on The Archers on Radio 4 and particularly the storyline that has devious, evil Rob Titchener slowly abusing his wife Helen to the point of no return.

Radio is a brilliant medium for this sort of story, allowing your imagination to fill in the detail of the full horror of Helen’s domestic hell, shout at her to snap out of her supine state and run for her life and hiss Rob’s manipulations in front of the rest of the dozy cast who seem to think he’s nice.

Now however I’m having second thoughts. The whole thing has been drawn out too long. It’s become agonising rather than compelling.

Rob needs to get his comeuppance soon. My nerves can’t stand much more.