The debate over whether to use genetically modified mosquitoes to fight malaria
vox.com
vox.com
Sub Saharan Africa has a population of roughly 1 billion people. So this is about 1/2000 of the population that die every year from malaria. If this was happening in the US, say 150,000 people a year were dying from malaria every year, including 100,000 children, do you really think there would be this huge debate about wiping out these malaria species using CRISPR?
Wiping out disease carrying mosquitoes would be one of the best things that could be done for global health. It would disproportionately benefit poor countries in general and children in particular. It is a shame that we as humanity are not making an all out push to eliminate these disease carrying mosquitoes.
Most scientists are attempting to build a public consensus around using gene drives as a public health measure. It might be possible, though, for a single rogue scientist to introduce a self sustaining gene drive that could eliminate malaria, without seeking permission from any people, governments, or organizations.
If you could do it, would you?
History probably gets written based more on whether it works out than on whether the decision was really morally sound based on what they knew about the safety.
Prosperity tends to lead to both environmentalism and consumption, so the impacts will likely be a mix of positive and negative.
To answer the GP more concretely: It is far easier for me to ignore the crisis far away than to risk the tiniest chance of problems close by. Yes, that's deplorable.
I think so. If I were really rich, I would seriously look into this and try to recruit scientists. Hard to say if I would actually do it since I would need to gather information first.
There are thousands of other species of mosquitos. I don't think there would be any noticeable consequences at all after a while.
It was a chemical that makes everyone friendly. But what they didn't figure out was that it also makes you really stupid. So the scientists avoid the rain (because that's what transmits it), but after a while they all give into being stupid.
And it worked great. Until it didn't. Of course nature kicked in and invasive weeds started evolving natural resistance to the compound leading farmers to pour more and more of the stuff on their crops to try to kill them off - a cycle that continues to this day [1] with no end in sight. Needless to say, our total herbicide usage has skyrocketed from something that was supposed to dramatically reduce it. Citronella, bed nets, and if you're feeling real frisky - the introduction of natural predators seems perhaps more reasonable.
[1] - https://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12302-0...
If I remember the procedure better, they radiated thousands of pounds of males so hey were sterile. They evidently only mate once, so it destroyed the population. I don't remember any real dissent discussion. The negatives of getting rid of them were minor compared to the pain and suffering this parasite introduced.
They are much more of what we think of as "tropical disease/parasite". I'd warn anyone looking at more detailed pictures other than wikipedia I linked.
They covered off the precautionary principle / unintended consequences concern by proposing to retain a breeding stock of the target species in a closed system (say a greenhouse).
You'd be looking at a few years to deplete or render extinct the wild stock, during which time you could be sure the malaria pathogen was absent from your breeding stock.
Once malaria, and the modified mosquitoes, are confirmed absent from the wild, you have the option to re-introduce. Naturally the option also exists at any earlier time if the species turns out to be more important than originally determined.
Or planting a lot of Artemisia annua, since both the CNRS and the Gates foundation now recognize this plant is a good alternative.
Ending malaria may take decades. We can prevent millions of people from dying now.
It's a good treatment, but malaria is a persistent little devil.
I went to the Pasteur institute for a diagnosis (which is basically the NASA of french biology) and saw a specialist in tropical diseases there.
The doctors nicely explained to me that the mix of Atovaquone–Proguanil does attack the parasite in the liver, not just in the blood cell, and that they had protocols to cure it.
- You'd have to commit to doing that forever. Malaria is ridiculously hard to eradicate without going after the vectors, and you'd have to be providing a continual course of it. You're not talking about "An African run factory to make this cheap" - you're talking about a robust continent wide distribution system. That's not an easy thing to do.
I've run into these kinds of problems all the time thinking about interventions in Africa - a lot of them posit an availability of infrastructure that isn't there.
- The combination of drugs in Malaron slows the development of resistance, but doesn't stop it. What's your plan for drug resistant malaria?
We're already preventing millions of people from dying now. This isn't an all or nothing campaign.
Also, anything that is not produced in africa will just make them more dependant.
Most international medicine, infectious disease, and global health doctors do.
There probably wouldn't be a debate if malaria were a big problem here.
These aren't diseases we worry about in the U.S. due to the largest public health infrastructure programs in the world.
Off the top of my head the only ecological role I can think of for them is as food for tick-eating birds. But I don't think there are any birds that subsist exclusively on ticks, so they'd probably be all right.
And for our general literacy, I want to point out that ticks are arachnids, not insects.
It's possible that in some local areas some animals would be severely affected. But even in that case climate change already changing natural balance. For example ticks are almost culling deers. It is better to find new equilibrium while humanity still can have some control over the ecosystem.
"I don't look at it [nature] as this morally benevolent place, it's a horror show"
The same thing was done in the U.S., where malaria used to be endemic until the 20th century. http://dcmosquitosquad.com/history-of-malaria-in-the-usa/
"If malignant malaria were eradicated from human populations, chimpanzees, in addition to gorillas, might serve as a reservoir for P. falciparum."
The climate is probably not the best for the parasite, but there was a number of changes that more or less unintentionally helped erradicate the disease.
First, there were enormous projects to improve farming. Basically all lakes became regulated and most wetlands were dried out to gain farmland. Before that there was a long period of improvements of living standards and hygiene - as simple as separate and better houses for the people rather than sharing a single house with the kettle. Glass windows got affordable for basically everyone, etc.
There are still mosquitos, including those that may transmit malaria, but the breeding opportunities and contamination paths got reduced below a critical level for the parasite.
I suspect that having cold winters helps, but I guess that the situation in Africa could be improved too with better houses and better control of potential breeding areas. It took a couple of hundred years in Sweden though..
Basically to get rid of it you have to kill the mosquitos or stop the people getting infected. That is hard with large jungle areas and tribal people who don't go see the doctor. In most places where people go to the doctor it does get wiped out. Eventually as Africa gets richer and people have modern facilities it would probably get sorted anyway but that may be a while. Things can go backwards too. In Venezuela it was mostly gone but has come back with the economic collapse.
The one you are talking about are sterile males. All they do is compete with the unmodified wild males, and can depress the population. As the mutation isn't passed onto any future generations, new males have to be continuously released. I remember reading somewhere else that this is already done in some places ( but I can't remember where I read it, so don't quote me on that ).
The other kind mentioned in the article are non-sterile mosquitoes designed with a trait, and paired with another set of genes that cause almost all offspring to carry the same traits. I think the article mentioned around 95% of the first generation would carry the change.
Pair that with a trait that causes more children to be male then female, and the population could be suppressed by only releasing one batch of altered males.
To me it sounds like a really good idea, but as mentioned in the article, once released there wouldn't be any way to really control where it spread.
I can not understand this comment. How is 438,000 annual deaths not an emergency!? We DO absolutely need to do it!
We humans don't really have a very good track record of dealing with the things Nature throws at us as can be seen with countless examples invasive species (imported to solve some problem or other) wrecking havoc on native species, super-germs &etc.
I seem to recall reading that mosquitos are a staple food source for birds or bats or something, what could possibly go wrong with killing them all off?
Humans have a natural immunity to malaria but nobody is saying we need to genetically modify everyone to have sickle cell anemia.
I am guilty of not reading the entire discussion here, so I apologize if this is a derail, but historically they outright eradicated the mosquitoes on some island... Which led to other things dying that ate the mosquitoes... Which led to yet more things dying.
I am failing to find a source, but maybe this blog post references it:
During WWII the Navy (which had a large base on the island) sprayed the village heavily with DDT to cut down the mosquito population. As you might imagine, DDT killed the mosquitoes...and most of the frogs, and is suspected of contributing to a number of cancer deaths on Ocracoke.
https://villagecraftsmen.blogspot.com/2011/09/mosquito-contr...
It's not a matter of it this genetic modification would have consequences, but what will those consequences and side effects be?
Our ecosystem is insanely complex, as show by the Biosphere II project. You can't just try to surgically alter one part without lots of unintended effects down the line.
"That might sound disturbing from an ecological perspective, but mosquitoes don’t make up a significant portion of any known predator’s diet; there’s just not a lot of meat there. “So far there’s no evidence really that seems to show that Anopheles gambiae is a key species in the ecosystem,” Jonathan Kayondo, a senior research officer at the Uganda Virus Research Institute and a member of Target Malaria’s scientific team, told Fong. “There’s nothing that exclusively feeds on it. So I’m finding it hard to see how that would collapse the ecosystem, because that’s the fear most people have.”
So either the scientist isn't very good at the google or just doesn't like "vampire spiders" and is lying about there being no predators for this mosquito. Whichever way you look at it this is the person you're trusting to release genetically modified organisms into the wild.
Regarding ecological issues surrounding the release of sterile TMs, of particular importance is that a reduction in the number of Anopheles is unlikely to have a negative impact on local food chains. According to (Pennetier et al. 2010) there are no birds, fish or other insects that feed exclusively on Anopheles mosquitoes, the only known exception being Evarcha culicivora, an East African jumping spider that feeds indirectly on vertebrate blood by selecting blood-carrying female mosquitoes as preferred prey.
from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alicia_Coupe/publicatio...
That sounds like a wise preference.
I personally would like to put on trial for crimes against humanity ever single person arguing for a delay in using this technology. Let them argue in court why hundreds of thousands of people (mostly young children and pregnant women) should die every year so they can pontificate about "unintended consequences" from the comfort of their armchairs.
For the record people do not have a natural immunity to malaria and removing all human pathogen spreading mosquitos would have no direct impact on any natural ecosystem.
I thought the "unintended consequences" of thalidomide was common knowledge and seen as a warning against the "look before you leap" mentality you're advocating.
It is even a more stupid argument as thalidomide wasn't stopped in the USA because of any concern about "unintended consequences", it was stopped because of the incompetence and sloth of the FDA. The FDA would have approved thalidomide with no issues, the USA just got lucky that thalidomide was used elsewhere first and so the effects were noticed before it was released in the USA.
Think The Simpsons did an episode on this involving gorillas and snakes or something.
Oh, and anyone who thinks that it's maybe is a good idea to study this irreversible idea a bit beforehand should be brought up on charges of Crimes Against Humanity.
And the thalidomide incident lead to the total rethinking on how drugs were approved throughout the world so the fact that it was or wasn't approved by the FDA is totally irrelevant to the discussion at hand, it was the catalyst of change that keeps people from willy-nilly releasing genetically modified insects into the wild today.
As far as I can tell they are actively working on this idea with test releases in Florida (on non-native mosquitoes) so it's not like anyone is trying to kill this idea as you imply. Ok, to be fair, some people are trying to kill this idea but that hasn't stopped them from releasing genetically modified mutants into the wild.
Thalidomide had nothing to do with the changes in how drugs are approved. The thalidomide "problem" was solved by never testing drugs in pregant women - of course if you are pregnant and get ill then tough luck.
The FDA has nothing to do with the regulation of genetically modified mosquitos as it is outside its regulatory control.
Yes plenty of people are trying to kill this idea and yes these people have slowed and will probably stop this idea ever being used. I would like them to be held responsible for the millions of deaths that result.
People with sickle cell do. That's part of why certain genetic defects are prevalent in certain populations: survival of the fittest in circumstances where the alternative is worse.
I think they have signed "right to try" into law. But there are very good reasons we want to test stuff before taking a big step. People tend to die as our way of finding out the theory is only half baked.
That's how we got rounded airplane windows: by planes going down in gruesome crashes that killed everyone on board, thereby serving as a clue that there was a design flaw somewhere in our lovely new jets.
Anyway this is totally irrelevant to the question of if we should continue to let people die while we sit around pontificating about unintended consequences. When the house is burning down it is not the time to talk about the unintended consequences of getting the carpet wet.
I am just expressing my extreme frustration at how something that could save millions of people is being held back because certain people are excessively cautious. I would like them held responsible for the deaths they are responsible for.
I can't speak with authority on many subjects, but as it happens, medicine is one that I maintained a deep familiarity with in a past life. (Medical and bio tech startups.)
There are over 200 surprisingly different species of Malaria. Humans are affected by five or six of them if I'm remembering everything correctly. Here is the thing, the number of species of birds, bats, antelope, monkeys, etc affected by those malaria strains is legion. So here's your problem in extremely simplified layman's terms, how do you make malaria kill ALL of its potential hosts? Then there is the question of Anopheles. Will your modifications kill that species as well? How do you stop the other 194 or 195 species of malaria from mutating to affect humans? Etc etc etc.
Continuing with overly simplified explanations, malaria has learned to "survive" over the past few million years. There are many parasites out there and I'd argue that malaria is far and away among the most savagely cunning in this respect.
What you propose is akin to the jedi handwave-y manner that people propose we "cure" cancer. It really is just not as simple as that. Historically, people have always found themselves to be "really, really, really close"...
and that last 1% never materializes.
Malaria isn’t the first parasite we’ve eradicated some of them we’ve eradicated globally and hopefully it won’t be the last.
The biggest problem isn’t the how but it’s how to do it in Africa where the infrastructure and the stability of governments across the entire region makes it a hard task to accomplish.
Though it's also a way easier target than malaria.
As far as I know we've never eradicated anything by modifying genes which is the part most people are concerned with.
Sure, drain the swamps and/or use whatever methods worked in the past but think twice before releasing mosquitos into the wild which have the unfortunate side effect of turning crocodiles into Godzilla with a single bite. I've seen the movies and <<spoiler alert>> it doesn't turn out well.
Also in several places malaria was eradicated using engineered mosquitos sure we didn’t use gene editing but rather much more coarse tools like radiation.
We’ve been producing GMO for 15 millennia if anyone thinks that throwing sperm at the wall or irradiating seeds is somehow not genetic engineering they need to get their facts in order.
A mosquito that out competes other mosquitos while living a short hyperactive life is a better way to eliminate malaria by not giving it a necessary gestation period. Areas where a mosquito's life is short do not have malaria.