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Comment by nisten | Hacker News Reader

At this point it's nearly becoming unethical not to use a gene drive.

Warming climate is spreading more and more diseases via insects. West nile, malaria, zika, chagas, lyme are all very much alive and kicking with no quick effective cure or management method in sight.

It's already ruined outdoor camping for example, I would not want my family members to be at risk of an infected tick bite, and the problem is getting worse every year. Lyme disease would mean a lifetime of medication and discomfort. By not using a gene drive and just arguing on the hypothetical dangers of it, we are letting more and more people suffer and inevitably use much harsher chemical methods to manage the problem.

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You mean warming climate is bringing diseases that were plaguing humans since centuries to the place you live and now it's suddenly a problem because it could affect you, too.

The west where most of medical research is located hasn't been caring about these diseases for a long time, that's where the neglected in "neglected tropical diseases" comes from. It's really sad that solutions are only being figured out once the west is affected as well, but I guess it's better than not figuring out solutions at all.

This projection of what OP meant doesn't speak to the reality.

Malaria was an issue in the US [1] and southern Europe [2] prior to the 1940s, and Australia has always had and continues to have issues with the Dengue and Ross River viruses.

If the claim is instead that CRISPR was sitting there waiting to be implemented for decades, if only some rich people could finally see a use for it in the face of global warming, a charitable take on that idea would be to call it far-fetched.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/index.html

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC547919/

There are possibly many remedies against NTDs, without needing any gene drives or CRISPR or anything. We don't know because we haven't tried. Sure, to some degree you can blame developing contries for e.g. not deploying rabies prevention well enough (which were deployed in the west decades ago, making rabies in the west irrelevant while it still persists in developing nations), but mostly it's the west's fault for not researching cures.

I think it probably has a number of factors, none of which excuse us on a whole for allowing these diseases to earn the adjective "neglected".

But it's not hard for me to imagine that many of the people working on this would like to eliminate malaria today for reasons which are at least partially altruistic. It could be that we've reached a point where the economics, social factors and technology of the present day mean that people have identified that CRISPR provides a more efficient and effective means of relieving the issue than anything we've tried (and people have) before, and in my eyes the fact that this method would use CRISPR instead of spraying and widely-distributed pesticide-coated nets, for example, doesn't make it morally or environmentally worse in any definite way which doesn't need constant reassessment as our technology and understanding improves.

Besides all of that though, and you touched on it in your first comment, it's just not particularly valuable for us to sit and criticize ourselves for not doing better in the past when faced with new technologies which may help us start to make up for our mistakes.

> but mostly it's the west's fault for not researching cures.

I though the whole white man's burden shtick was considered racist nowadays.

" Lyme disease would mean a lifetime of medication and discomfort". Although long term problems are possible from Lyme disease, it is very unusual. 20 years ago I contracted Lyme disease. After a 4 week antibiotic treatment, I have had no other effects and I believe this to be typical.

If you get antibiotic therapy right away, then usually everything is fine. The problems arise if you don't seek medical advice right after a tick bite. Then the bacteria get into places where they can't be reached easily (like joints) and get out every now and then, plaguing you for decades to come. Often people don't even realize they've been bitten and think they've got the common cold or something when they get a little sick, not knowing it's lyme disease that they have. If you get a tick bite, you should keep it and give it to a doctor to be tested. You should also check for symptoms like a circle of red skin around the bitten area.

> At this point it's nearly becoming unethical not to use a gene drive.

And what are the odds the gene drive spreads to other mosquito or insect species, via e.g. horizontal gene transfer? How sure are we that we can target one species, and leave others unscathed (or rather, un-extinct)?

This is exactly the kind of logic that led to Silent Spring. "We think we have a viable solution, we haven't really evaluated any of the side effects, but we need to act, and act fast!" We went through this with DDT. It worked; we killed all of the insects. It had side effects we didn't anticipate. Then it stopped working due to resistance.

The question is, did we learn anything from this history, or are we going to be equally incautious with each new technology we come across?

> We went through this with DDT. It worked; we killed all of the insects. [...] Then it stopped working due to resistance.

If it killed all the insects, resistance would not have developed.

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