Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrfusion | Hacker News Reader

Maybe some things are worth the risk.

We shouldnt sit around bioethicizing while people are dying of maleria.

Even if your premise is that we should prioritize human life above all else, there's still a very good reason to consider the effect of eliminating any species on the rest of the ecosystem before we just pull the trigger. It's really easy to imagine a scenario where eliminating this mosquito ends up being more harmful to human life than leaving it in place.

I agree that we should think about the ecosystem. But is that something we can reasonably model? From what I understand Anopheles isn't thought to be essential. Plus, this demonstration would show we could do similar things with other similarly dangerous and potentially non-essential animals.

Though a counterpoint, malaria was eradicated from Europe without eradicating Anopheles.

Europe is not tropical.

I'm not sure what that has to do with the topic at hand. Malaria was eradicated from Europe by a lot of stuff that happens when a country moves into a first world economy. Eg: Window screens (a mosquito net for your whole house!), less stagnant water spots (breeding zones), better health care, etc. Malaria was eradicated from Europe because the Plasmodium couldn't reproduce in large enough quantities.

Similar to the Four Pests Campaign:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign

By April 1960, Chinese leaders changed their opinion due to the influence of ornithologist Tso-hsin Cheng[2] who pointed out that sparrows ate a large number of insects, as well as grains.[8][9] Rather than being increased, rice yields after the campaign were substantially decreased.[10][9] Mao ordered the end of the campaign against sparrows, replacing them with bed bugs, as the extermination of the former upset the ecological balance, and bugs destroyed crops as a result of the absence of natural predators. By this time, however, it was too late. With no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned, swarming the country and compounding the ecological problems already caused by the Great Leap Forward, including widespread deforestation and misuse of poisons and pesticides.[10] Ecological imbalance is credited with exacerbating the Great Chinese Famine, in which 20–45 million people died of starvation.[11][12]

The effect has been considered, carefully, by a variety of researchers, and to date the majority of them have found no reason to believe there'd be more than the most negligible of effects on ecosystems. (When specifically eradicating the species that spread disease to humans.)

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

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35408835

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/kill-all-mosquitos...

https://outline.com/428REE

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/02/20/4670944...

You can find some articles from researchers in the field that are concerned about removing them (https://phys.org/news/2017-07-mosquitoes.html), but those researchers don't seem to have done as much work in the role of individual mosquito species in their environments.

You say it's easy to imagine bad scenarios. Then state them, with sources.

I've read the exact opposite: That it's hard to find any _real_ risks for eliminating human-biting mosquitoes. I define real as killing near 3k children a day.

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

Yes, here it is again, the nearly ten year old magazine article written by an intern. Nothing could be more definitive.

At least it's something. You're welcome to add some sources of your own to the discussion.

We've eliminated hundreds, if not thousands of species, like the Dodo Bird, through human actions. What's one more?

This is exactly the mentality the hand-wringers are terrified is out there.

Early vaccines got the dosage wrong and sometimes killed people... I think in this day and age if something similar happened, it'd be pulled off the shelves, and tens of thousands of lives would be lost due to it being unavailable.

Progress = risk. Yes, it should be measured and thoughtful, but overreaction seems rampant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com