GM fungus can rapidly kill mosquitoes that spread malaria, study suggests
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
How could it be stopped if something went wrong? It's not like a chemical agent that you just stop applying when you notice adverse effects. This is a living thing. Living things can procreate, mutate, enter new niches and the only deciding factor is the rate of reproduction. Life doesn't optimize for killing malaria-carrying mosquitoes, it optimizes for rate of reproduction and survival. As soon as there is a mutation that can extend the niche to another target, this will happen. And getting such a match doesn't have to be via a mutation on the fungus either, it can also be one of the target, making it susceptible to it.
How do you make sure these things don't happen? I'm worried that the answer is that you can't.
(Edit: I'm not even talking about engineered organisms, just have a look at a list of invasive species)
For example, we'd get sick a lot more if we weren't teeming with more or less symbiotic organisms. A fungus that specializes in infecting Anopheles and also destroys the resource that it is optimized to consume isn't just going to up and start dissolving rubber.
Research was made in the nine species known of the genus Metarhizum. Some of them are known to science since only 10 years ago when some of the species were better studied and split and hidden species appeared.
Some species seem to be specialist, like M. acridi, that target grasshoppers. Other are generalist, like M. anisopliae that can attack insects of seven different orders. Some spores can be diseminated by water and target aquatic larvae, other spread by the air. Surprisingly, M. anisopliae is sold since a few years and used with the purpose to kill beetles of several species, and planned to use it to kill ticks and mosquitoes.
Source: Journal of Funghi 2017, 3 (30).
So first doubt, are the species used in research really specialist and selective?
"A transgenic, broad host-range M. anisopliae strain expressing an insect neurotoxin (AaIT) from Androctonus australis reduced mobility and blood feeding interest of adult Aedes aegypti mosquitoes"
"broad-host range" looks the opposite term to "specialist" to me
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6128571/
More things: Mosquitoes die quickly
"Since M. pingshaense spores take 2–3 days to penetrate host cuticle, RFP and Met-Hybrid do not cause mortality 24 hours post-infection ... Met-Hybrid achieved >80% mortality within one week with LT80’s of 5.18±0.482 days, 5.54±0.326 days and 5.25±0.269 days for Anopheles coluzzii, An. gambiae and An. Kisumu, respectively".
So when it says "fungus rapidly kills mosquitoes", maybe should say, "fungus kills mosquitoes between 2 and five days"
"The fungus has been given genes to produce an insecticide, known as a “hybrid”, first extracted from the Australian funnel-web spider and already approved in the US for treating crops."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/malaria-mosquitoes...
This is what the independent says. I haven't found an official source for this claim but if true, I don't have words for this fact, only expletives. Has somebody asked american citizens if they agreed to participate in this experiment?
http://vestaron.com/products.html
It's a spray on insecticide and has gone through EPA approval.
This is not an idle question. It's a critical question for informing a decision-making framework that rests on calculation. Which we need here - I think we can all agree that personal ick-factor is a bad approach to large-scale public policy.
Which is to say you're right. We cannot be certain that won't happen with this approach. Indeed, we cannot be certain of all consequences with any approach.
With that in mind, what level of certainty should we require?
Approaches like insisting on fully and completely explore all the ideas that are readily palateable before we try to understand the potentials and risks of others seems like making policy primarily based around personal ick-factor. Which is great when choosing what to have for dinner, but maybe somewhat less than ideal when every delay means thousands more dead people.
Also, vaccines can run horribly off the rails. One cannot mutate into a pathogen, as you say, but tainted vaccines are a known risk. There may be unknown long-term risks or other things that haven't been fully studied. No approach is risk-free in this arena, and we do a disservice to humanity when we pretend otherwise.
You literally just defeated your own logic. The reason we do medical trials and "delay" is to ensure the vaccines aren't "tainted" as you put it, and to ensure that there are no delayed side effects.
But... you want to rush an alternative option that could kill literally millions, because waiting could mean thousands die??
I do not think it reasonable to rush through any thing, option, or approach in this arena. I do not suggest or advise any actions of the sort in any way, shape, or form. I do think it's worth taking the time to ensure that risks are handled properly. I think it's worth having a uniform framework for identifying what those risks are and reasoning about them to enable planning. I also think we should consider carefully the potential benefits of exploring multiple possibilties, against the chance that the most pleasing and lowest risk ones do not pan out.
Again, please accept my apoligies for being unclear. I hope I've made myself clearer! Please don't hesitate to ask if there's anything else I can communicate better.
The live polio vaccine absolutely can. Before polio was largely eliminated, it didn't really matter, but once the risk of getting the wild-type virus dropped below the risk of getting it from the vaccine, it stopped making sense to use the live-attenuated vaccine.
http://www.virology.ws/2015/09/10/why-do-we-still-use-sabin-...
People don't generally get vaccinated against smallpox anymore because the pathogen has been eradicated.
With that in mind, it's perhaps worth considering the potential benefits of having a uniform framework for evaluating risks that are attendant upon any given possible course of action. Risk evaluation neither starts nor stops with personal ick-factor or the worst scenarios imaginable. Risk evaluations also need to include the probability of success, expected costs, the estimated probability of any negative outcomes or side-effects, and so on. It's a non-trivial endeavor.
Again, you're right. The risks of any possible course of action, particularly poorly understood ones, are very real. They demand meticulous and systematic evaluation.
Risk management, on the other hand, is about determining risks that are reasonably likely, and figuring out contingencies and mitigation strategies.
In your opinion, is it reasonably likely that a fungi that is engineered to kill a specific species of insect (and only those carrying a specific disease) can somehow go out of control and end up killing all insects on the planet? In my opinion, it is not.
It's a form of concern-trolling: deep down inside you are against something, but don't want to say that openly, so instead you pretend to side with the proponents, but choose to play the role of "concerned citizen" and invent scary scenarios at the extreme ends of the probability spectrum, with the suggestion that "we should probably research this thing more before we try it!"
What is encouraged is taking actions that have well understood OR bounded risk.
By bringing up "concern-trolling", I am concerned you have given up the fight. By avoiding the direct argument and retreating to this supposed hidden argument, which is much easier to counter, there is not anything left to discuss. Tell me if I am misunderstanding.
I'm suggesting that some sort of risk evaluation framework more sophisticated than "Gee, I can imagine a scenario where this kills us all!" might be in order.
Also mutations, often have to overcome obsticles to conquer a new niche. They have to reach a specific habitat or deploy seeds at a distribution system (cars driving dirt roads e.g.).
Lets take a nice little SciFi Example- NASA breeds in its lab a terraformer for venus, a sort of airborn spirondella. This could potentially wipeout all live below, by covering a planet with green "living" clouds.
Now this organism could escape the lab, bot as long as it does not reach a warm, wet climate it is dormant. So even if this dangerous organism was out there- it could potentially deteriorate before it reaches the equatorial belt and starts to bloom.
Nothing is certain in nature, but one thing- if its a success - it trys to be a exponential success.
DDT worked very well, initially, but its effects and consequences were intractable and long-term. It's still deployed to various degrees of effectiveness, but usage is far more complex than the initial promise of getting rid of Malaria.
A GM fungus 99% kill rate sounds good, but for insect populations that might not be enough. You likely can't use it again to kill 99% of the 1% left, and so on.
DDT is a chemical. You can stop using it to mitigate some of the unforeseen side effects. How can one retrieve or stop GM fungi in the wild? What patterns of resistance will emerge?
With DDT we got "lucky". It turned out to be overall effective when combined with guidelines and different approaches, but it never rooted out malaria completely by itself in one fell swoop.
Creating natural enemies of a pest by genetic modification is a valid approach, but not something to deploy wide-scale at the first hint of success.
Yes, there are ways to do this wrong. We have a much better idea what they are and our standards for precision and reliability are much higher. The 1940s are long gone and we aren't the baby boomers. We require seat belts in all cars, houses to be built to fire and electrical codes, and household chemicals to have plain labels and clear warnings.
We also now know that we need to specifically target something like three sub-species of mosquito and that if we hit exactly those three the ecological impact will be essentially zero; we've verified that they don't compete with anything and that nothing eats them and that they don't interact in any of the dozens of ecological systems that professional biologists understand that programmers never learn about. We know that we need to hit exactly those sub-species because DDT happened. We know that we need to study things like evolution rates and virulence before deploying engineered organisms; we have, after all, all watched Jurassic Park.
The people working on this understand what will happen if their solution isn't good enough. You are not adding anything to this situation except uncharitable negativity. You cite DDT. I'll cite Greenpeace, whose blind opposition to nuclear power is still contributing to the ongoing death of our planet. Don't be Greenpeace.
There are situations that have no possibility of redress.
Your paragraph about ecological impact can serve as an example of the lurking danger. I wasn't even concerned about ecological impact. My concern was about artificially creating a resistant species. That's one of the pitfalls here. We're talking about the same thing, but because it's new we're not addressing the same issue.
We got away with DDT because:
- We could stop using it.
- There were alternatives that reshuffled the genepool of a now largely resistant population the other way, after the fact.
These two are not a given when deploying engineered organisms. Even though both are means to fight malaria, they are not the same and need different considerations of which some are new and not valid for any older approaches.
> The people working on this understand what will happen if their solution isn't good enough.
So do most programmers...
I spat out a post in ten minutes that looked further out than you did. I wasn't even trying.
The people that actually do this stuff are trained, credentialed biologists and ecologists that have taken courses on this and spend literal decades reading studies about proposals and going down checklists of things that have caused problems in the past. It is literally their job to make sure nobody can say "You didn't consider X" during review, on the news, or in court.
Back in tenth grade I took an honors biology course. The year's final project was to write an environmental impact statement for, if I recall correctly, chopping down twenty or thirty trees in a nearby park. In retrospect, we worked off what I suspect was a massively stripped-down version of a tiny fraction of the real rules.
It took five of us a month and we wrote a hundred pages single-spaced.
> So do most programmers...
I certainly won't argue that the field of software engineering doesn't need more rigor - there are reasons that I prefer writing cleaner code than my coworkers often do. But this proposal isn't operating in the same regime I usually do.
I mangle data at scale for a fuzzy rules-engine type thing. I bet you do something with comparable correctness requirements. There are times I've looked at a bug, looked at the logs, figured out the underlying conditions, estimated the future occurrence, concluded that I spent more money just looking at the logs than it would cost to remediate the data by hand for the next ten years, and estimated that it'd take me three times as long to actually fix it. I do know what happens when my solutions aren't good enough, and I bet you do too.
Aerospace and defense programmers operate in a regime far more like what we see with these environmental proposals. And guess what? They know what happens when their code isn't good enough... and they have huge checklists that they go down for every single change and have their code audited regularly and tested obscenely thoroughly and spend weeks tracking down tiny bugs, stamping them out, and adding them to the checklist.
(Before you bring up the recent boeing failures: Take a look at the politics and incentives. Where did the economic and political incentives lie there? Where do you think the economic and political incentives lie for a proposal like this? Especially given how much environmental fearmongering we see as a result of movies like Jurassic Park? Do you think that anyone would dare approve a project like this with anything less than every single i dotted and every single t crossed?)
> but because it's new we're not addressing the same issue.
Development of resistance is such a well-known failure mode for pest-control tools that wikipedia's page on DDT has a whole second-level paragraph titled "Mosquito resistance".
Why do you think that evolution and resistance are novel failure modes, and why do you think they'd have been missed in the analysis?
Very much so. You were presenting how there would be no danger to the ecosystem if these three sub-species were successfully destroyed. I never got as far because I wondered about the similarities of population regrowth after destruction with insecticide and destruction with modified organisms.
> Before you bring up the recent boeing failures
I don't need to. Building nuclear facilities is (usually) a very rigorous field with the highest quality of engineering, but sometimes factors of design considerations interact in ways that create new conditions that were impossible to predict. And since you mentioned aeroplanes: if you look at NTSB reports, you often find the cause of crashes is a long chain of trivial events, every single one of them meticulously checklisted and tested with fallback modes to avert disaster. It's not the components, but the intractability of the web of interaction.
> Why do you think that evolution and resistance are novel failure modes
Because evolution and resistance are novel failure modes in the context of genetically designed natural enemies. Previous statistical models might not hold even though the situations modeled appears exactly similar.
> why do you think they'd have been missed in the analysis?
Genetic modification is a statistical process, much like an AI network where something goes in and the output is measured for fitness and fed back. Random artifacts are to be expected and accounted for, but cannot be known to exist before the fact. As such their model might be complete, but it might not be sound.
As you implied, rigor is important, and faced with potentially irreversible consequences, skepticism is not an unnatural or irrational response.
1) Because many spiders (but not all) are evolved to target insect methabolism instead mammal methabolism
2) Because spiders aren't bees. The majority are solitary and small, have a limited body size and can just inject a single tiny dose of its extra-potent poisons.
3) and their tiny chelicers are too small and weak to pierce the human skin until reaching a layer with circulatory system so the poison is stopped by the stratum corneum of dead cells in epidermis and other upper layers of skin
Now lets suppose that a spider could grow indefinitely and make an unlimited amount of poison, like a fungus
And lets suppose that spider poison could be breathed directly and pass from lungs to blood wessels, and acumulated all day like fungus spores entering in your nose
What could happen? shalalala
Maybe nothing
or maybe any insect of any species would be poisoned eventually in presence of spores. They take air directly. Result: collapse of agriculture by simultaneous decrease of suitable pollinators at all levels
or maybe humans would have a new type of allergy, part allergy part nervous poisoning.
People tired of breathing poison all day after a strong rain? People now allergic to a previously harmless and widespread fungus present everywhere?, in its modified and wild forms?
Atracotoxins. Stuff extremely toxic for a particular kind of animal: primates, causing pulmonary and cerebral edema in humans.
Fortunately for mosquitoes, atracotoxins are relatively weak as insect killer. Big spiders rely in their fangs to subdue the prey. My congratulations for the people that so carefully designed this experiment.
We've had to ask you multiple times not to break the site guidelines. Would you mind reviewing them?
And with fungi this is especially dangerous because spores get literally everywhere and are hard to eliminate!
Unless we can ensure the fungus is engineered to not generate viable spores on a second generation this is a recipe for disaster.
Some points to consider:
- Those who study the strains of mosquito (a generous 50 out of ~3500) which spread disease in humans regularly state that they are not a primary food source for any one predator.[1]
- Malaria killed 429 000 people in 2015, 90% of those being in Africa, and many of them children.[2]
- All of our current control methods have unintended consequences. Take for example that NGOs who offered insecticide-treated mosquito nets to communities found that they were being used in waterways for fishing.[3]
- In developed nations we are happily deploying much less targeted solutions without significant levels of complaint (and to counter relatively less serious mosquito-borne diseases), such as the indiscriminate aerial spraying of insecticides over large areas and waterways.[4]
Everything is a trade-off, admittedly, and we can never know the full set of consequences in advance (see: the impacts of introduced species), but it might be a useful exercise to weigh your concerns against the benefits to sub-saharan Africa as a whole (and to individual African families) that could materialize were these particular strains of mosquito to be eliminated.
And give a little credit to those educated people doing the research into the likelihood of ecosystem collapse and producing reasonable peer-reviewed results.
Edit to add: That said, I'm personally partial to the efforts which release genetically-sterilised males. That seems less like the plot of a Hollywood doomsday movie than a spider-venom fungus.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/09/13/what-would-hap...
[2] https://www.who.int/features/factfiles/malaria/en/
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/31/global-u...
This is one case of me falling on the side of intervention. Malaria is a terrible scourge, primarily on children. So much so that humans evolved sickle cell anemia as a prevention.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/2/l_012_02.html
Namely
It also has the upside of being short lived. That is to say if we ever decide we need to stop using the technique, we just stop breeding sterile males. As opposed to invasive species or chemicals lurking in the soil or water long term.
Supposedly they can be bred pretty cheaply, too.
That strain also kill some rice grubs.
The controlled installations in the picture look pretty piss-poor, such that GMO is already in the wild by now.
Still, if there's been a snag in the road for that approach, this appears to be a viable alternative
Bad outcomes for gene drive are either that it doesn't work, or the mosquitoes go extinct in nature and cause more ecological issues by their absence. The worst problem is fixable by keeping live specimens for reintroduction. In fact, since malaria is the target and not the mosquitoes, reintroduction might be a good idea after malaria becomes extinct.
Bad outcomes for the fungus is it becoming uncontrollable and starts killing other insects. Reintroduction becomes impossible without engineering a new, immune mosquito. Or that evolution backfires on the spider and causes them to go extinct. Or all of those happening together.
Comparing the two, the fungus has all the downsides and more, with zero upside.
On top of that the spider venom is probably bad for the fungus. Apart from taking away resources from synthesizing actually useful proteins, it kills the hosts much more quickly. The fungus probably prefers to kill the host slowly in order to cover more distance.
Yet.
It’s definitely possible for it to adapt to infect something that’ll help it proliferate farther.
I presume that the fungus is obligatorily parasitic, meaning it can't thrive outside its host, except as a spore. This is true for most pathogenic fungi.
From the article it's not even clear that the fungus "spreads" well or at all in a mosquito population. I think they intend to grow the spores large-scale in a lab, and infect most of the mosquitos directly, and not through secondary transmission...
Also: The fungus already exists in the wild. It just doesn't kill the host that quickly.
Edit: For the record, I am serious. I'm not saying that this isn't a good idea, but simply assuming the fungus won't evolve and attack new hosts is naive. It needs to be monitored and controlled very, very tightly. Imagine if it somehow started escaping and attacking the already strained bee population or something.
Not using what we can against something this horrible is a choice, too. And one that has the greater of consequences.
It's easy to poke holes in things from the sidelines. That action is actively causing us to drag our feet and kill a lot of people.
It should also be noted that mosquitoes are not depended on as a basis for any known food chain.
Regardless, it’s a lot.
https://ourworldindata.org/malaria
It's gone down a lot recently due, I'm sure, to a lot of effort on this front.
Further down, at [2], they discuss why these charts are so different, pointing out that IHME was estimating roughly double the rates as the UN in Nigeria, DRC, and India due to "differences in methodology, data coverage and sourcing".
Cool, that's nice. But what happened in 2003 to turn this all around?
According to the IHME itself, "One of the biggest forces in the decline in malaria deaths was the advent of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM), which provided 40% of development assistance for health targeted toward malaria from 2003 to 2008."[3]
So that's neat.
It's important for us to keep in mind that while aid often messed up terribly (especially in the late 20th Century), a lot of aid has been working really well for decades now. We figured out, for the most part, how to provide aid without it all going to funding corrupt governments, or destroying local agricultural economies.
Here's where I do a quick shill for The Against Malaria Foundation. They're very well-rated by Givewell[4], so if you want to stop malaria, I highly recommend giving them money. :-)
[0] https://www.againstmalaria.com/
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-malaria-deaths-by-...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/malaria#data-quality-definitions
[3] http://www.healthdata.org/research-article/global-malaria-mo...
[5] Also, the mentioned GFATM: https://www.theglobalfund.org/en/
Malaria used to be widespread in Italy. It was causing 15000 deaths/ year in the 19th century. It's nowhere to be found now thanks to insecticides and soil drainage.
So I'm a bit sceptical when I hear that climate change will widen the range of malaria. The range already included the first world, we eradicated it.
The reason former colonies haven’t been able to do the same at home is because their society and economy are permanently crippled by colonization.
Colonization, was brutal, self-serving, and its economic consequences are still felt to this day (especially when neocolonialism through private corporations and puppet governments is still a thing).
>> The reason former colonies haven’t been able to do the same at home is because their society and economy are permanently crippled by colonization.
Here's an interesting passage from Early China: A Social and Cultural History ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GA22L0E/ ):
> Even when we are talking only about the areas that can be considered as part of Early China, back in a time when "China" as a nation was still in her infancy, we find that more cultural developments had taken place in the valleys and strips of plains that are surrounded by mountains and plateaus on the second step mentioned above, or on the transitional belts along the major mountain ranges, but not at the centers of the floodplains located in the east. The reason for this development was simply ecological, given the fact that in the second millennium BC most of the eastern China plains were still covered by marshes and lakes[2], and the coastline in some sections was at least 150 km inland from today's seashores. The pre-Qin texts record the names of more than forty marshes or lakes on the North China Plain, most of which had dried out after the third century AD. In fact, for millennia the North China Plain was continuously caught in the process of sedimentation by the Yellow River which carried on its way east huge quantities of earth from the topographical second step [areas 1-2 km above sea level].
> [2] Even in the historical period, it was recorded that the Yellow River had changed its course some twenty-six times.
The Yellow River killed vast numbers of Chinese who farmed its banks, even being given the name "China's sorrow". But efforts were made:
> Over time, as the bottom of the channel gradually rose, the river overflowed its banks. Dikes were built ever higher to prevent flooding, and in some places the river started to flow above the surrounding countryside. Today, in a stretch of about 1,100 miles, the Yellow River moves along 11 yards above the plain.
> Under the Qin and Han empires [roughly 200 BC - 200 AD], the Yellow River was the core of Chinese civilization, home to around 90 percent of the population.
( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003TXT09W/ )
During that period, the Chinese hadn't really settled farther south, because... it was full of swamps. But the swamps were drained, the people moved in, and the Yangtze River basin and areas further south had become the demographic center of China by the end of the Tang dynasty in, um, 900 AD.
Tang China was probably the wealthiest country in the world at that time. But it was much poorer than any country today.
Warring States China in 400 BC was much poorer than that.
So no, no one has been "permanently crippled by colonization", and if they had, draining the local swamps would still be well within their means.
I'd recommend reading Factfulness, by Hans Rosling. It'll cause you to rethink some things.
edit: Here's an interesting fact for you. In the late 1990s, the global extreme poverty rate (around $1.80/day in today's dollars) was 29%. Today, it's under 9%. We've wiped out two thirds of the world's extreme poverty in twenty years. https://www.gapminder.org/topics/extreme-poverty-trend/
What a strange way to engage in a debate. I already explained why I think the gap is compounding. Feel free to offer a constructive rebuttal if you disagree.
> We've wiped out two thirds of the world's extreme poverty in twenty years.
That is fantastic. How does it relate to the compounding power gap we’re discussing?
So yes, "Is this belief feelings-based?" is an incredibly important question.
So how does the question of the rapid reduction of extreme poverty relate to the "compounding power gap"? First, it shows that progress is being made, that the poorest of the poor are doing much better than they were as recently as two decades ago.
But more importantly, I do not believe you have demonstrated with facts and evidence that there is a "compounding power gap". You believe that there is compounding power gap, based on the fact that there is a power gap at all. But actual, fact-based evidence suggests that power gap (measuring by dollars as a proxy, since you didn't offer a standard of measurement for your power gap) is decreasing, and rapidly. With some exceptions, the poorer nations are increasing their wealth at a far faster rate than richer nations are.
Consider this chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_GDP_...
It's a list of countries by GDP growth rate. I assume you're familiar with the miracle of compounding, since you used that word.
The first European country on the list is Ireland, at 13. The next is Hungary, at 40. The first former colonial power is the US, at 107, more than halfway down the list.
If you don't think that economic growth is a reasonable proxy for "compounding power gap", then what is?
First, don’t use yearly growth rates when discussing long-term trends. The data is too noisy. Ten year averages should be your minimum for the topic at hand.
Second, GDP is not a useful way to detect the ways in which former colonies are crippled. There are several reasons, but just to name a few: it does not distinguish raw materials from refined goods and advanced industries (why do you think Lybia is on top of your list?); it does not reflect quality of life or security; it does not reflect independence from foreign interests; it does not reflect military power or the ability to influence global and regional affairs. There isn’t a single metric which neatly reflects every dimension of the problem (I never claimed there was), but as a starting point for further research, I recommend studying the UN’s IHDI report. You can find lists of countries sorted by IHDI. Another good thing to do is study the bottom third of pretty much any sorted list of countries - by IHDI, HDI, any variation of GDP or GDP growth - and ask yourself 1) “why are these countries in the bottom?” and 2) “how likely are these countries to be in the top third in 50 years?”.
Third, study the role of Trans-National Corporations in the world economy. How much do they contribute to the economic output of former colonies? To what extent are they headquartered in former colonial powers? To what extent are their profits, and capital gains realized by their shareholders, reinvested in former colonies vs. colonial powers? Can you spot a compounding effect?
Fourth, for a different take on the problem, study the racial wealth gap in the US, Canada and Australia. Study the development state of indigenous nations within those countries. Can you guess the root cause of this state of affairs? Can you spot a compounding effect?
Lastly, quoting from your favorite self-help book doesn’t make you magically smarter or more convincing, just obnoxious.
I hope these pointers will help you in your quest for “factfulness”.
Why is Libya at the top of the list? Probably due to the growth response to the cessation (or at least reduction) of civil war. That happens. And no, this doesn't take into account raw materials vs advanced production, which is a long-term growth concern for many countries. On the other hand, many former colonies are developing advanced manufacturing, particularly in Asia.
Military power and the ability to influence global affairs via violence is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Exploitation at gunpoint is no longer a viable economic model, and hasn't really been since WWII, which is why colonization ended in the first place.
Believe it or not, former colonies are independent nations with independent economies and independent goals, who don't just exist at the tolerance of great powers anymore. Your attitude towards them pretends to be supportive, but is actually utterly condescending. Really, please stop and think about that point.
I'm well aware of the role of trans-national corporations in this system (I use the phrase "neoliberal hegemony" pretty freely). But the simple fact is, when those corporations invest in former colonial economies, they're creating jobs and growth there, and there's a lot more opportunity there than in the fully developed economies of former colonial powers. That's why those economies are growing so fast. China in particular (a former colony itself) has invested heavily in its "Belt and Road" approach to investing in infrastructure to create mutually beneficial trade opportunities - building ports, factories, communications, etc.
And yes, I'm aware of the racial wealth gap in the US (which is a special case in many ways) and other countries. Been studying it for decades, actually.
Of course you think it's obnoxious. You're getting told that your condescending attitude towards former colonies and reactionary attitude toward their "oppressors" is wrong, that things are much better than you think they are. Being wrong is a bitter pill to swallow. But which is better... feeling good about being wrong, or being right?
It's not weird to think a book can make you smarter, either. Assuming you believe reading and learning in general make you smarter (I assume you do), and that smart and engaged people are sometimes wrong (I assume you believe that as well), then it stands to reason that a book dedicated to understanding how smart and engaged people can believe incorrect things will make you even smarter than before.
The gap is closing.
Your post is quite long, but none of it actually supports this conclusion, or even mentions colonization at all.
My home state of Minnesota jokes about mosquitoes being our state bird, but I have zero risk of catching malaria from them. That's because malaria isn't carried by our native mosquitoes. So our cost of mitigation is rather lower.
> The only approved vaccine as of 2015 is RTS,S, known by the trade name Mosquirix. It requires four injections, and has a relatively low efficacy. Due to this low efficacy, the World Health Organization (WHO) does not recommend the routine use of the RTS,S vaccine in babies between 6 and 12 weeks of age.[1]
> A WHO-led implementation program is piloting the vaccine in three high-malaria countries in Africa in 2019. The first phase of the project, covered by grants from Unitaid, Gavi and the Global Fund, is planned to establish the feasibility, impact and safety of RTS,S, when used as part of a routine immunization program.[2][3] Research continues into recombinant protein and attenuated whole organism vaccines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria_vaccine
It seems to be quite complicated.
- This is something.
- Therefore it has to be done.
Why not just modify the mosquito which has been shown to work?
Not to mention other diseases spread by mosquitoes.
Im down for trying.
I grew up with parents that urged me to prevent pools of standing water, but don’t lots of non-mosquito insects need standing water to breed?
Sure, they can use the other pools of standing water not near humans. The reason it works to limit some species of mosquito (mostly aedes aegypti) is that they preferentially seek to bite humans and so live near them. Other bugs seek out plants and other bugs so they can live elsewhere.
Then again, malaria kills lots and lots of people every year, and I suspect if I was in a malaria-prone country I might feel different about the balance of protecting humans vs potential ecological effects (even if in the long term this might cause big negative changes)
I know that certain species of Killifish in Africa can survive and reproduce in pools left behind by foot-prints. So, yes, quite interesting micro-ecosystems can exist.
https://pondinformer.com/pond-fish-that-eat-mosquito-larvae/
How many mosquito control agencies is that?
Nothing ever matters less than your, "aim". Intentions are massively overrated. What matters are the actual effects as measured in objective reality. One of the many reasons society is the toilet that it is is because so many judge initiatives and propsals on what they are "intended" to do or what the "aim" of a proposed action is. The Inquisitor who burns you alive because he intends to purify your soul is just as bad as psycho who burns you at the stake because he wants to watch you burn.
But if I understand the article correctly, the fungus is quite deadly to mosquitos, achieving "local" extinction quickly, which also stops further spreading of the fungus.
I know that it's frustrating when even scientists sometimes act with naive recklessness. A prime example is when people in the social sciences or economics don't think about individuals' incentives enough. But in this case I doubt that the people in question are unaware of the risk of overshooting their target.
We talk about a plan to disseminate a potent lethal poison claiming moral reasons. Not unlike releasing gas sarin in metro (for highly moral reasons also, everybody has a good reason stuck in their head). Killing millions to save thousands and so. The main difference here is that is a lethal stuff regenerated constantly and released in the air at random days. Yup, this could be worse than sarin attacks. Any fail would be permanent.
There are dozens of spider poisons known that are weak or harmless for people. They had choosen instead the poison that is worst... not for the insects, the worst for us. The more efficient killing people.
And they plan to give this people's serial killer to fungi, to spread it under the soil and into the air. Fungi kingdom is a poorly studiated group of life beings, with a sophisticate defensive methabolism and a complex ecology. Several species can associate and fuse into one (lichens) and two species can be different forms of the same species; therefore there is some risk of horizontal propagation of the modified gene to other species with unpredictable comsequences.
Forget pot smokers, this people should receive inmediately a visit from FBI in their headquarters. They have a lot of things to explain, and I'm talking seriously.
Are this organisations, supposedly full of smart people, so hierarchical that nobody could point to the obvious elephant in the room? Even a child could see it coming.