Hacker News Reader

I find this incomprehensible. It's a disease. What does it matter if it is bacteria, eukaryote or virus? Medicine involves killing things that interfere with us and hopefully eradicating them completely.

The whole "mosquito extinction" fears are really overblown. Nobody is proposing to eradicate all species of mosquito - only the ones that carry malaria. And the normal system of eradication (removing standing water) is much more invasive than the proposed method of genetic engineering.

Not, is not a disease, is an animal.

An animal that can cause a non lethal and treatable disease in part of its life cicle, and is linked with copepods, frogs and fishes, dogs, baboons and humans.

There is a simple solution in two steps to avoid being infected with guinea worms:

1) don't drink copepods. Provide african people living in the same distribution area as this animal with a modern system of water purification; or teach them to boil the water before drink it, so they will not eat alive water fleas that carry the larvae. Simply filter the water trough a cloth before drinking would be enough to protect you from this parasite (but will not protect against other problems so boiled water technique is much more safe). If not, use chemicals to treat drinking water.

and 2) people infected by the parasite should avoid to bath in drinking water or put their wounded feet in drinking water.

Life cycle stopped and end of the problem in the same year with the magic of parasitology

Why we sould not run to extinct entire species?

We don't know where hides the next cure for cancer, the next cool matherial for engineery or the next modern generations of painkillers. Parasites had helped in the past with some of our problems and could hold the key to a treasure of solutions to our present and future problems.

Even if not, to randomly remove pieces of a machine could lead to unexpected consequences. This animal is the result of million years of evolution and when is gone, is gone forever. If we find in the future that some of those consequences are undesirable, the machine is beyond repair.

It's as easy as those two steps, but in most of Africa those two steps are not easy. Read the article: for the people in Africa affected by the worm the disease is so debilitating they are unable to grow food or continue their education. This parasite ruins lives.

>Why we sould not run to extinct entire species? We don't know where hides the next cure for cancer,

This is like trying to argue against abortion because any given baby could be the next Einstein. Sure, but any given baby could also be the next Hitler... and both statements aren't even wrong (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong).

Whatever ill effects of the guinea worm's extinction can be overcome. If they can't, we were all probably going to die anyway.

I'm reasonably sure that we will not find a tiny hitler inside the packets of 6 guinea worms, but if is really there, we could choose just not follow it

The "not even wrong" argument is incorrectly applied here. We are not talking of filosophy, this is biology so the idea that parasites can be useful is perfectly falsifiable. We can just do more research and find if something in this animal is useful (nothing prevent us to do this because, well... is not extinct).

We have many examples of parasites doing useful things before and the "99%" of species are still really poorly known, so that wouldn't be an impossible scenery.

Here is another humble and useless roundworm that fortunately nobody decided to extinct before 1960's:

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

From living in mudville streets to became a space survivor and genetic rockstar. Not bad

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2992123.stm

Look: Your ideas are misguided and dangerous. Read the article to see the effects of the guinea worm. The parasite ruins lives.

The "not even wrong" was applied appropriately as the statement "there is some good to be had from keeping the guinea worm" is potentially true but practically unverifiable and is part of an argument whose goalposts can be moved easily and indefinitely, and are already so far away as to be unassailable.

There is some value to biodiversity and its study and there are likely parasites that are beneath our radar but that this specific one can be isolated and studied and has recorded negative effects on humanity is enough to destroy it.

>I'm reasonably sure that we will not find a tiny hitler inside the packets of 6 guinea worms, but if is really there, we could choose just not follow it

Maybe studying the DNA of the guinea worm leads researchers to a breakthrough in targeting retroviruses at vulnerable human subpopulations and genocide is committed because we didn't exterminate it!

See? You don't know that won't happen!

> Your ideas are misguided and dangerous.

Torches and pitchforks at this hour of the nigth? ok I'll start running.

Well... Or maybe yours are wrong. At least you grant that biodiversity has "some" value. If we start wipping species just by caprice, there will be easier to extinguish the next. Is a slippery slope, and we will shoot ourselves in the face at some point with some serious and totally unexpected cascade of consequences. It has happened before. It happens all the time.

> the parasite ruins lives

For a year or less. Is a nuissance, for sure, but people can fully recover from it to enjoy the rest of their lives. Can be easily avoided with just a bucket and a piece of cloth and there is not any reason to let the people with the parasite walk for the water when a bucket is enough to alleviate their feet.

Poliomyelitis ruin lifes, this... hem, not normally.

Alright, we've gone full circle. You're just repeating how super simple it is to avoid infection (it's not, otherwise no one would have guinea worm and it'd already be extinct!) and minimizing the impact this has on people's lives without actually addressing anything I've brought up.

Wouldn't be my intention to minimize the impact it has currently over the lifes of 30 people each year in the entire planet, but you must admit that among 7700000000 humans (0.0000000039 % of humanity affected by Guinea worm) is not a high number.

With zero people dead by this animal in the last years, does not feel like its extinction would be an urgent problem to adress.

If we wipe it, what would prevent somebody tomorrow to ask for the extinction of the much more dangerous sharks?, or tigers, polar bears, scary spiders, and dogs of course (dogs kill lots of people each year, maybe we should wipe them), or pretty much anything alive that could cause allergies to some people, or that could be seen by somebody as disgusting or ugly.

Economic resources are limited and we have worse problems that are not being adressed.

We as a species cause the extinction of other species at such a rate that we’re considered on par with geologic processes (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction). I’m not here to argue that this is a good thing, but instead that, hell, let’s at least turn this terrible ability towards some good. Guinea worms and a. gambiae suck. The former causes pain and suffering without any detectable benefit. The latter is probably the biggest killer of humans, and there’s plenty of other stuff its predators can eat. Screw them.

Thank you. We drive species extinct left and right with hardly a thought. Now we need to be really careful about two that attack us directly and effectively?

Good luck getting most of the crowd here to understand this perspective. I applaud your attempt at encouraging people to stop and think about things, but most people here seem to have grown up well protected from difficult things and think that if they try hard enough all pain and struggle can be removed from the path of humans through time.

I just finished my chicken slaughter for the season; it being fall up in the Northern Hemisphere. I did my best to make sure the chickens didn't suffer too much, but killing is not a perfect science. I do know that they were really well taken care of compared to the wild birds around us for the last three months.

I would never wish Guinea worm on anyone. I have first-hand experience with worm-based parisites and the pain/suffering they bring. It's awful. But life is a cycle, and belief in eradication of anything as a solution to suffering is, I believe, evil in it's truest sense.