US government approves 'killer' mosquitoes to fight disease
nature.com
nature.com
I'm all for trying to fight disease but how deeply do we actually understand what we're trying to solve. How do we know that we actually aren't going to make things worse down the road?
Most of the "whoops" tales we hear are people that didn't listen to their scientists telling them not to, didn't have scientists at all, or were from long enough ago that we can discard their stories as irrelevant in the same way that we'd discard things like "spaceflight is impossible" and "nukes will end war". We've now traced the food chain around malaria mosquitoes out to three or four degrees of separation, including things like their competitors, the diseases they carry, and the things they spread those diseases to. Their entire ecological niche is trivially replaced by close relatives that don't carry malaria to humans. They're not even common enough to have major food-chain or crowding effects like you'd see with ants, rabbits, kudzu, or sparrows. Everything that we can find says that the damage from eradicating these two species would be zero. Not "small", not "manageable". None.
Malaria-carrying human-biting mosquitoes are small enough and unimportant enough that we should be thinking of them as disease organisms rather than insects. I'm sure you're perfectly happy with the eradication of bot flies, polio, and smallpox; why not A. gambiae and A. funestus?
Mosquitoes are prevalent even in super clean places, btw. I used to live by a small creek in Austin, TX and in the summers I could basically never enjoy my yard: it would be flooded by mosquitoes (the creek would have standing water which mosquitoes require to reproduce).
Harming nature to the point that it harms humans wouldn't fit into that philosophy.
Mosquitoes are responsible for millions of deaths every year, and hundreds of millions of infections often with severe disability. We understand stuff pretty deeply now. According to https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html eliminating mosquitoes would not cause major ecological issues.
So when you have millions of people dying every year from a cause on one hand and only vaguely specified fears of some nebulous future harm, the reasonable and ethical thing to do is to do what you can to eliminate mosquitoes.
We are such an arrogant specie.
I'm not.
Me, I say kill the mosquitoes.
(Although, honestly, even if you did have such a plan, I'd still say kill the mosquitoes in addition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15665373)
You can only maybe guaranty fast.
And the unknown is huge on this one. Just like the potential horrible consequences.
The way you talk scares me a lot. I feel like I'm in front of the stereotypical american gun owner in tv shows.
If you can't see the difference between defence and offence, local area of effect and genocide...
What do you think a person's immune system does to smallpox when they have been inoculated against smallpox and they are exposed to it?
We're not actively killing mosquitoes just preventing them from breeding.
The mosquito is a special case considering how it carries lethal diseases, of course. So to me, control is certainly acceptable (mass extinction, I'm not so sure either).
My guess is at any rate that this won't be a mass solution even if it 100% works -- applied at too much scale and a likely result is mosquitoes will develop resistance to Wolbachia (just as they have with chemicals when we tried massive control with pesticides). As a localized solution, this is intriguing.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323533 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15502074
If natural selection was at play, I should have died when I was 12 without my appendectomy.
Human are all about saying not today to the God of death. For them self.
So I just wish we continued this "not today" things, but with a broader perspective including not sawing the tree branch we are sitting on. Like destroying the entire ecosystem with our brilliant ideas.
Plus, there is a lot of BS with this "killing millions" arguments. As I lived in Mali, and worked in Senegal, Uganda and Kenya, I can tell you that:
- people there consider it like a big flu. It only kills the very weak, others just have it like you have a running nose in the winter. And those people are weak because we destroyed their countries, we still leach them, so they have poor infrastructures and poor access to major resources, including food, clean water and decent hygiene.
- We have had a cure to most forms of malaria for several years now. Not something experimental or mysterious. I just went to the Pasteur Institute in Paris for that. You have protocols based on Malarone (surprise, it's not the preventive-only drug they tell you it is, it can cure as well). But besides tropical disease expert doctors, nobody will let you know that. And Malians don't have the money to buy it anyway. See previous point.
So mosquitoes are not the problem. The problem is that our system are killing millions.
Should we solve that problem by a collective suicide ? Apparently death of the mass is the popular solution to people dying.
Is the selective pressure that strong that an animal family that generally doesn't bite humans and ouf of the tiny percentage that does there is an even smaller percentage that carries a bacteria that can kill humans is required for the entire families survival?
No insect is killed. The only change is that the mosquito doesn't carry a bacteria. Yet you equate that to the destruction of an entire species.
Case in point... this is the mindset that worries us.
What's our track record on changing ecosystems to fix problems without creating worse problems? Zero out of how many?
I hate mosquito too, and they are probably useless, but no good engineer makes changes without a backup and a tested rollback strategy, where's our backup?
Then the males will die, and wild males and females will continue to mate and produce viable offspring unless the process is repeated. There's plenty of room for finding errors and fixing them --up until all mosquitos are eradicated.
Rabbits in australia are a pretty famous example, but I can't walk out my door without seeing numerous fails related to introducing plant species.
Honestly I sometimes wonder how we still haven't killed ourself already. We are very lucky bastards.
If we find that eliminating this particular mosquito species is harmful. We can just reintroduce them from somewhere else.
Without quantification, this position is basically unfalsifiable. Plus, there's a trivial contrapositive that is just as valid: "what if allowing mosquitoes to live causes an outbreak of a new disease that is transmitted by mosquitoes and kills billions?". Sure, that could also happen. As with total food-chain collapse from reduction of population of a non-keystone species, it seems very unlikely. Contrast that against the almost-certain probability that 0.5m will die next year (0.1 Holocausts per year, or one Holocaust per decade) from malaria.
If we don't attach a probability to these outcomes there's no way of having any sort of meaningful conversation about them.
edit: Seriously, wouldn't it be best to solve existing problems with direct threat to food production than to go off tinkering with new ideas and unknown side-effects?
Their presence in the US is itself an example of manipulating the environment to our own ends.
May we be so lucky as to have those problems instead of _millions of people dying every year._
1. Is it probably better than the current solution
2. What could go wrong
The first being (probably) true does not negate the need to ask the second.
The new option may have a completely different risk profile
If the cost benefit analysis of the new solution is worse because it has greater risks, then it can't be better than the current solution.
Does “EPA approves release of infertile mosquitos” sound as scary? Because that’s what’s actually going on.
Maybe we will finally get better movies....
Wait a minute. Brits also created the US. The problem are not mosquitoes. It's the UK!
Makes me think of the four pests campaign. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign
We know that kills far more than mosquitoes.
What i was using this example for, however, was the unpredictability of influencing an infinitely interconnected and complex system. In the case of the four pests, the influence was crude and especially myopic, so it makes for a wonderful example.
It is rare that the influence ends where we imagine it would. There are many possibilities for race conditions which i know i can’t even imagine.
Rabies is terrifying; you devolve into madness and convulse to death. Botulism is terrifying; you become paralyzed and asphyxiate. Ebola makes you hemorrhage. Tuberculosis can literally destroy your lungs. Smallpox produces horrible painful lesions. Screwworm infestations are just kinda horrifying.
So people see malaria as something bad, but not something scary. Screwworm is scary to even consider, so people jump to agree that, yes, it should be eliminated, nature be damned. Malaria is scary too, but I suspect that it doesn't engender the same physical fear response in most people. Hence the debate about mosquitoes.
Sounds like a potential use-case for that mosquito zapping laser[0], which I've heard can target by gender.
[0]https://www.fastcompany.com/3059127/what-happened-to-the-mos...
I don't think I've ever considered "killing" the optimum strategy for sorting before.
What resources are mosquitoes competing for in the environment?
It's obviously not a one to one with cats, just a similar technique of population control via sterilization and release.
Well, right after that, insects started proliferating, so then they had to exterminate all of them.
Among the insects killed, pollinators died. So that region now looks completely Marsformed and now all agriculture required pollination by hand.
Killing a species can start a slippery slope.
--- start quote ---
... the arctic tundra actually has the biggest mosquito problems in the world, because the land there is a perfect incubator for mosquitoes.
Mosquitoes control the migrations of woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou). Their massive herds in Canada are always on the move to find food, but in the summer they travel a lot more, covering greater distances and moving to higher ground, sometimes avoiding the best feeding sites, because they are trying to avoid the gigantic swarms of mosquitoes that plague the Arctic regions in the summer
The caribou are clearly bothered by mosquitoes, losing up to a liter of blood a week during the worst outbreaks, so if asked I’m sure they’d vote for eliminating mosquitoes, and given their population size and herd mentalities they’d likely come out to vote in large numbers.
--- end quote ---
[1] https://www.quora.com/profile/Matan-Shelomi/Posts/Mosquitoes...
We use bleach to kill bacteria, insecticides to reduce insect populations, condoms to negate the course of insemination, and breed animals and plants to have specific properties they might not otherwise acquire for our sustenance (cow, pig, chicken). Do you not consider these processes the same? If so, do you disagree with these, also? If these are not comparable, why are these different?
Drawing a line in the sand seems impossible given our footprint on the globe. Instead, some educated analysis of the benefits and consequences of our decisions seems like the best we can do.
Do you suspect that isn’t being done here?