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Comment by ommunist | Hacker News Reader

Is MBTE really specific to only A. gambiae and A. funestus?

Something like 30 out of the 500 anopheles species are capable of carrying malaria. Of those, only those two matter, because the rest won't bite humans. Eradicating those two would be sufficient and another species (that doesn't bite humans) would take over. "Bites Humans" is furthermore not a strong enough competitive advantage to overcome any attempts to eradicate a successor that picks up the disease-ridden malarial torch.

Look at this problem from different angle. These two species are only abundant in areas where humans live. The malaria annual death toll is about 440000 lives. Maybe it is more worth of an effort to move humans out of there?

Since no one is going to eradicate cars worldwide just because the annual human death toll in car accidents is 1.25 million!

But the ongoing cost of eliminating cars would be enormous. The ancestor post is saying that there would be only fixed costs involved in eliminating malaria-transmitting species of mosquito.

What really ailes me is that all research is concentrated on killing poor mosquitoes, not the Plasmodium, which is the real cause of the disease. Should we also kill all the cats because they carry Toxoplasmae?

Given the that Toxoplasmae causes detrimental brain effects in humans, yes. Absolutely 100% unquestionably yes, without a doubt.

We could keep a few cats isolated behind glass in zoos. Isolated cats don't matter.

You understand! Lets apply for IMO grant for that.

If it's a matter of animal rights, cats have a hell of a lot more higher-order brain-functioning than mosquitoes do, because the latter have effectively zero.

Amusingly, anthropophilia versus zoophilia is genetic. If we all cleared out of Africa completely, those problematic mosquito strains may well go extinct. Now I'm wondering how fast they'd re-evolve. So it's probably more like the case I thought of at the end of my first post, where we'd have to stamp the property back out every time it evolved. It'd be pretty easy, though, and without a major animal reservoir it'd probably give us enough breathing room to eradicate the disease itself with ebola-style quarantines.

That's interesting; could another approach then be to use CRISPR to switch the anthropophilic species to zoophilic, and thus sidestep the "ecological destruction" argument that is the main objection to just destroying those species?

I think a cost-benefit analysis supports gene-drive-based mosquito eradication, but this option might be as effective and more politically palatable.

You'd be forcing them into another ecological niche, where without additional changes to adapt them to their new diet they'd likely be outcompeted and die. It'd be a complicated and inefficient route to eradicating them just as surely as if you'd killed them all.

Should we also help malaria reestablish in the areas we previously eradicated it? You know, Europe, the US.

This is technically possible. I wonder what political aim of such a campaign might be?

Let me know when you find a place that will accept and support 180MM Bangladeshis and 1B Africans.

Kill the mosquitos. It's cheaper in the long run.

Mongolia.

>It's cheaper in the long run.

Is it? A human that survives to reproduce that would have otherwise died from malaria uses more non-renewable resources than a human that dies from malaria over the course of their lifetime, and continues to do so after their death by way of their progeny.

In terms of how much time we have as a species before running out of non-renewables on earth, killing the mosquitos might cost more than our blue marble can afford.

Perhaps certain natural population controls ought not be tampered with.

The benefits of human population control through disease, isn't much of a benefit at all, as child mortality and fertility tends to be correlated. The less chance of your kids dying, the less kids you'll have, in general. This probably means that while we might see a population boom in an adjustment period, we'd probably soon see drops in fertility.

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