Hacker News Reader

Comment by jkot | Hacker News Reader

> foreign contagions brought into the country can spread like, well, rabbits.

> is caused by a mosquito-borne virus

I think it is just question of time, until some countries decide to eradicate mosquitoes on their territory. Seems like cheaper solution than vaccinate entire population against dozens (if not hundreds) diseases.

View on HN

Yeah seriously. Eradicating mosquitoes would be vastly cheaper, save millions of lives, and improve quality of life everywhere. What good have mosquitoes ever done?

One plausible way to do this would be to engineer a male mosquitoes that can only produce male offspring. Eventually the female population would be reduced to 0.

Mosquitoes are the main food source of some animals, which leads them to die out. Then those animals are the food source of other animals, etc. etc..

Also, the male mosquitoes also pollenate some plants and flowers, which also negatively affects the ecosystem- only the females bite.

> Mosquitoes are the main food source of some animals, which leads them to die out. Then those animals are the food source of other animals, etc. etc..

Actually, several biologists believe the impact would be minimal, or even beneficial:

"Yet in many cases, scientists acknowledge that the ecological scar left by a missing mosquito would heal quickly as the niche was filled by other organisms. Life would continue as before — or even better."

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html

We don't need to eliminate all mosquitoes, but primarily only the Aedes genus [1]. That said, some of them are pollinators [2], but I don't think they are for any food crops.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aedes

[2] http://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/pollinators/pollinator-of-t...

Lots of [citations needed] there.

> What good have mosquitoes ever done?

They are apparently an important pollinator of certain flowers, including the blunt-leaf orchid.

So then the question becomes, what good has the blunt-leaf orchid ever done? However in my brief research it looks like other insects do pollinate the orchid also. It also grows far north so would not be affected by wiping out the mosquitoes that cause zika in the south.

There is an FDA approval for testing Oxitec's GM mosquitos in a small scale trial in Florida.

There are also small scale tests in Brazil and the Caymans.

http://www.humanosphere.org/science/2016/08/fda-approves-gen...

I've read about that. They breed sterile mosquitoes, which reduces the local population by 90% after release. But it's nowhere near as ambitious as my plan which would drive them to extinction. Also the locals are heavily opposed to it and trying to stop it : /

Yeah but I think Big Pharma would rather make the money themselves. That's all it's ever fucking about.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com