Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)
isglobal.org
isglobal.org
1 Mosquito 1,000,000
2 Human 475,000
3 Snake 50,000
4 Dog 25,000
5 Tsetse Fly 10,000
6 Assassin Bug 10,000
7 Freshwater Snail 10,000
8 Ascaris Roundworm 2,500
9 Tapeworm 2,000
10 Crocodile 1,000
11 Hippopotamus 500
12 Elephant 100
13 Lion 100
14 Wolf 10
15 Shark 10
0 Traffic 1,350,000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... (2016)
Consider the move from horse drawn carriages to vehicles.
It was an acceptable risk that anyone might be permanently disabled due to being kicked in the head or trampled by a horse.
This might be a horse you are simply walking past. Or one that is spooked and running down the street. The owner of the horse beared little to no responsibility.
Now it is largely acceptable, to permanently disable or kill someone due to a mistake or some form of common negligence while operating a vehicle.
It is almost not a crime to accidentally run someone over. This is “normal” or “not intentional.”
In the future, it will seem insane to have allowed so many people manual control over multi-ton vehicles.
Just as it does not make sense that a horse would be tied up outside Trader Joe’s and due to a spook permanently disable you as you exit the store.
It will seem so primitive to have such loose controls on cars that if you chose to drive a manually controlled car killing someone will likely be seen as dangerous enough of a choice that a person would be held liable for manslaughter.
> Now it is largely acceptable, to permanently disable or kill someone due to a mistake or some form of common negligence while operating a vehicle.
There were many years at the beginning of the automobile where laws were created[1] to save humans, horses, and livestock from being run into by automobiles or locomotives. After enough of society was normalized to the existence of large guided missiles, these ways were dismantled.
> It is almost not a crime to accidentally run someone over. This is “normal” or “not intentional.”
It's not 1st degree murder (usually), but the circumstances of a traffic collision do sometimes bring felony convictions. Society has absorbed the risk and people have adapted.
Interesting note: US and Euro cars can't be homogenized because the US NHTSA tends to assume that passengers don't wear seatbelts (so manufacturers optimize for fewer injuries with that assumption) whereas the Euro equivalent assumes that all passengers do wear seat belts and optimize for that assumption.
> In the future, it will seem insane to have allowed so many people manual control over multi-ton vehicles.
I think future people will be capable of some amount of empathy with people who came before them who had to deal with inferior technology.
I don't know if horses were statistically more or less dangerous than cars, but I feel like when I read about a random historical figure from before cars it's pretty common they died from a riding accident.
Today, horses are allowed on public streets and not regarded as particularly deadly, at least in my locale. In particular, the police ride them during public events.
I have, on occasion, ridden a horse, a bicycle, a motorcycle, driven a car, and ridden in planes. The only time I was seriously injured was on a bicycle.
Horses give excellent visibility, they can stand and walk slowly, the take less space than a car, they are fast if needed and people tend to move away from a moving horse quite naturally
While I think that we should totally put the blame on drunk drivers, I would still make a distinction between negligence and intentionality.
Saying that drunk drivers intentionally kill people opens the door to saying that bad doctors kill people, bad medicine teachers kill people, people who vote for the wrong politicians kill people, politicians who enact bad laws kill people, etc.
At that point the discussion devolves into "your party kills people because your ideology is wrong", "no, yours is"
We distinguish this from "malice", which is when you do something with the direct intent to cause harm. An engineer who verifies that a design causes harm, and signs off on it because they want to cause harm, is being malicious.
Malfeasance is a crime, but it's one we actually can't catch very well, which is the reason we can't "do statistics" on it. Unlike with murder (where we almost always know that somebody caused someone's death, even if we don't know who; and therefore we can work out the statistics even without resolving the perpetrators); we have no idea (without thorough, expensive investigations that don't usually happen) how many of the e.g. buildings that fell over, fell over because of malfeasance, rather than because of a complex accident.
There's a lot of data[0][1][2][3] to back up the correlation between speed and deaths, that's the whole focus of vision zero[4].
[0]: https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...
[1]: https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/speeding
[2]: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/motor-vehicle-safe...
[3]: https://www.curbed.com/2017/7/28/16051780/us-traffic-death-s...
Is it appropriate to apply a universal standard, or the standard of the person who was involved in the event?
It depends on what you want to calculate. I think in a way, the latter is more objective than using an arbitrary single standard.
1.5 Suicides 800 000
I was in an a little bit conflict zone recently, and people asked if I was worried and said I should be careful. They didn't know -- the local people living there -- that the traffic is 100 times more dangerous than the slightly ongoing conflict. They just look at the news and feel worried about whatever the newspapers write about, which is _not_ the traffic.
And maybe people would realize they're being manipulated by media and the "presidents" who own the media -- those presidents tend to get more votes, the more afraid people are for each other.
> collective psychological effect
Maybe peace?
And fewer traffic accidents, more subways and trains. Better mental care
> Approximately 475,000 people die every year at the hand of fellow man. In a world filled with conflict, war, murders, and acts of terrorism, this is unfortunately not that surprising. Deaths among humans are intentional and pre-calculated making them beyond tragic.
Traffic is not an attack.
Cows or the sugar plant depending on who you believe if we are counting anything. We attack them and we die.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_dog_attacks_in_t...
The pattern appears to be, very young child, or older adult, attacked by either a pitbull or pack of dogs.
That's not an accident.
Many dogs involved in attacks are erroneously typed as pitbulls (which is, in fact, a designation encompassing at least 3 different distinct breeds); genetic testing later reveals that they were not. Pitbulls are the "Moors" of dog breeds.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109002331... https://dogbitesohio.com/are-pit-bulls-unfairly-being-design...
Unfortunately, the stigma surrounding pitbulls is influenced by shaky notions of racial and behavioral genetics that mirror eugenics and its progeny.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/08/racism-and-the-americ...
https://www.newindianexpress.com/lifestyle/health/2020/jan/1...
https://www.underwatertimes.com/news.php?article_id=03214697...
I actually saw this standup bit recently and after Googling, it looks like it was borrowed ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLwYkZUNvKo&feature=youtu.be...
To clarify, it's actually the other way around, the standup came BEFORE the blog. Should have realized the upload date is not the performance date.
https://www.espn.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/3722/shark-atta...
Sharks can't do very much damage to humans because, in the natural course of events, it is impossible for a shark and a human to meet.
But sharks are quite dangerous conditioned on the fact that you're encountering one.
In countries that have good rabies control this is not an issue. For example, the US has 30 - 50 deaths due to dogs each year.
In countries around the world, it's more about packs of wild dogs and rabies, instead of just rabies alone.
Countries/Regions that have wild dog pack problems: India, Some Eastern European countries, South East Asia (almost all people who grew up in South Eastern Asia would have a childhood story of being followed home by a pack of dogs. They are quiet at the beginning, they follow you, and if no one else is home when you get there, LOCK THE DOOR and God protect you), some parts of Australia.
Growing up, I was ashamed that my dad was so scared of dogs, but the dogs he grew up around were incredibly violent and unpredictable compared to the domestics we’re so accustomed to here in the States. I think he and his brothers raised a puppy they found in the village, and it bit him pretty terribly when it grew up, so he has zero trust for animals. And he’s the most rational man I know, so it was weird to see him carry this memory so strongly into his 50s and 60s.
I don’t think he’s ever used it before (he lives in the Bay Area), but he’ll literally turn back from 5 blocks away if he realizes he’s forgotten it. I guess I’m trying to say: these kinds of environments are really traumatizing, and you should totally believe what the parent is saying. It’s a different world out there.
> Any human interaction with a shark in its environment, shark wins.
this is straight-up wrong. Humans and sharks interact all. the. time. They're not killing machines.
I imagine you probably know that, so I'm not trying to patronize you (honestly). But this is really important.
SHARKS KILLED 4 HUMANS IN 2018. HUMANS KILLED 100 MILLION SHARKS IN 2018.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/01/28/shark-a...
Most people spend maybe hours a year in shark ecosystem. Vs 365 days a year in dog country, or mosquito etc.
Most sharks will run away from the human as the human and their bubbles look far bigger than they are. They are more intimidated by us than we are by them.
You run into mosquitoes 30k times a year, one of them may kill you, and most of the time you could have saved yourself on your own.
https://www.insectidentification.org/insect-description.asp?...
Wonder if those Murder Hornets will make next year's list?
I was curious, so:
> Since 2001, the yearly human death toll caused by stings of bees, wasps and hornets in Japan has been ranging between 12 and 26.[26] Since this number also includes deaths caused by wasps, bees, and other hornet species, the number of deaths caused by Asian giant hornets is likely to be significantly lower.[citation needed]
from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_giant_hornet
[26] is a Japanese source that I cannot read.
Seems like they're not a huge threat?
Their nests are pretty cool though. Kinda like a flat hex grid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduviidae#/media/File:Assassi...
If they disproportionally kill even more than other mosquitoes, that also puts things into greater perspective. Perhaps if we could target this particular species, it would save millions of human lives.
"""Mosquitoes kill more people than every other animal combined. One species, Aedes aegypti, carries diseases such as dengue, Zika, yellow fever, and chikungunya which make hundreds of millions of people sick every year"""
[1]: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Mosquito-Week-2018
[2]: https://www.geekwire.com/2018/gates-foundation-teams-oxitec-...
This is a horrible way to spend the last few seconds of your life on Earth and it likely triggers all the self-preservation instincts in a human mind, and then some.
The slow, painful death from a debilitating disease like malaria does not even come close for sheer compulsive terror. After all, most people experience sickness at some point during their lives, but very few experience being eaten.
This "raw, visceral horror of being eaten alive by a very big fish" [1] is the reason why people are afraid of shark attacks much more than mosquito bites or even accidents etc.
____________
[1] That's a quote from a National Geographic article I read a few years ago that stuck in my mind. I have no reference to it, apologies. It was in an issue of the print magazine.
https://www.askmen.com/news/entertainment/deers-kill-more-pe...
1 Hepatitis 1,340,000
2 Mosquito 1,000,000
3 HIV 770,000
4 Influenza 489,000
5 Human 475,000
6 Rotavirus 440,000
7 Hantavirus 150,000
8 Measles 140,000
9 Rabies 69,000
10 Snake 50,000
1 Mosquito 1,000,000
2 Human 475,000
3 Snake 50,000
4 Dog 25,000
5 Tsetse Fly 10,000 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdocI'd like to know if the OP manually aligned the columns in the table, if they used a program to do so, or something els.
We get malaria from a parasite that is spread by mosquitoes.
We get tuberculosis from a bacteria that is spread by humans.
TB kills more than three times as many people every year as malaria. Why is malaria counted as a death caused by mosquitoes but TB isn't a death caused by humans? Either you count both or you count neither.
It is probably fair to count TB deaths in the "human kills" category, but I think we usually make a differentiation between human to human disease and disease caused by contact with an animal. It's just the way we see ourselves as separate from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Although I get what you're saying, I don't think that human deaths caused by TB is necessarily what people are interested in when you aggregate all of the of humans at the hand of other humans, which may be why those deaths are omitted.
They're saying that 1,000,000 is the number for mosquitos, not because they kill people but their a carrier of disease.
What they are asking is do we consider other animals in the same capacity, such as, does the number beside humans include human transmittable diseases (HIV for example).
Seems like a reasonable question.
Just to be clear, I think it's a perfectly reasonable question. A rational question can still contain a potential flaw.
But I did misunderstand what they were asking.
Humans are also vectors for pathogens, we just don't count them as such.
They don't count humans the same as other animals, instead, they count homicide/war (intentional killing), and you can just consider it a point of reference. Are you going to count accidents? Suicide? Anything that can be traced to human decisions? Anything that can be traced to human biology?
Any way you count humans, it just isn't going to be equivalent.
First - if you're going to say 'mosquitos kill humans because they transmit disease' and then include humans for a completely different reason (i.e. homicide) makes for an odd comparison.
For example, what if human transmission of the communicable disease results in some massive amount of death, which could very well be the case?
Second - mosquitoes are carrying a lot of otherwise benign things, which most people recover fine from. Possibly things like the flu. Well some people die from the flu, but very rarely. So I'm not sure if the fact it was communicated by a mosquito or something else makes sense.
Maybe inanimate objects, like the door handle to your public building, contribute more to basic pathogen spread, like the flu, in which case again, that would put things in context.
It's a tricky thing to compare lions attacking people to mosquitos that happen to spread in some cases, some minor thing that in may have rare deadly consequences.
Malaria is almost exclusively spread by mosquitos, so there is a certain logic to saying "mosquitos kill a lot of people." But you are right that most times you are bitten by a mosquito, it is nothing but a minor annoyance. It's a bit different from a lion.
Some people include deer in such charts, because people die by crashing their cars into deer. But that is pretty different too.
Besides, there's a very wide gap between what the West is and was willing to do when an infectious disease happens.
When Malaria hit the West, we drained entire swamps (and their ecosystems) without a second though. When corona hits, we justifiably lockdown entire countries. When Malaria hits poor people, it's think about the Mosquitoes. I can't help but think there's a very ugly thing behind this double-standard.
Basically, the West developed and rid itself of a lot of disease and predators. But if developing countries try to do this, all sorts of “environmental” objections are raised.
I have even heard people say that mosquito borne illnesses are good because they keep people in poor nations from expanding into “pristine” forests.
Basically, if there were 100’s of thousands of children dying in the West from malaria, we would do anything to get rid of the problem(and we did). But when it is other people’s children dying, it becomes “think of the mosquitos.”
I don't disagree with you at all, I am just not sure how these concepts are related. Xenophobia?
You're absolutely right that western nations developed by radically altering environments. There's a certain sort of hypocrisy with environmentalists lobbying developing nations. I remember an elementary school trip about DDT and how it affected local peregrine falcon populations.
And we're paying the price now with increased vulnerability to hurricanes. (Swamps absorb the storm)
I think that trade off was well worth the cost.
Nature doesn't care if humans all die. Nature doesn't 'care' at all. Humanity does. And this looks very ugly and very hypocritical.
Last time, we "merely" almost wiped out a whole class of apex predators and caused a collection of trophic cascades. This time, with a menu of unintended consequences only the most obvious of which is the "colony collapse disorder" that's been imperiling pollinators worldwide, we might just end up managing to break modern agriculture entirely and cause famines worldwide, too.
So, yeah, "targeted interventions" merit extreme skepticism, because we as a species suck at them. If you want to look at that through a lens of anti-Westernism, you're welcome.
Nobody expected DDT to drive large birds of prey nearly to extinction. Nobody expected neonicotinoids to concentrate in ecosystems and have a very similar effect on the insects we depend on to pollinate our food crops. It's not about predicting that terrible things will happen. It's that we aren't able to make sure terrible things won't. Neonicotinoids already have us at non-negligible risk of worldwide famine through agricultural collapse as a result of consequences we were too stupid and too hubristic to predict. How many millions do you think that will kill if it happens?
Because that's the kind of risk you're proposing - and, just as with that famine, it's a risk that will hit worst on the most vulnerable, least privileged people in the world. You know? The same ones in whose supposed defense you're making such a performative display of contempt?
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...
I'll note that the modern suggestions to eradicate Malaria are more nuanced and at least try to only affect the parasite/host. e.g. releasing sterile males, immunizing the mosquitoes against the parasite[1], ATSBs, a GM fungus to poison mosquitoes, making human blood deadly to the parasite[2], etc.
IMHO (I'm far from an expert), the most promising seems to be releasing sterile males followed by some of the other approaches to deal the death blow to the parasite (though if the mosquito goes I won't be bothered).
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3340992/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23067008 I wonder whether this can scale...
I also lived for a time as a child in Manitoba and my grandfather got live altering malaria, so I don't share any love for these insects but we're part of something bigger and just because the west drained entire swamps doesn't mean I support that or that it validates making a species extinct on purpose.
The only reason people are even thinking about it, is because it doesn't affect the West. That's callousness masquerading as environmentalism. %$#@! the ecosystem* . People are more important.
* Nevermind no one has even shown any way that anything aside from the target would be harmed. Or that we could reintroduce the species once the parasite is gone.
You do know humans need a functioning ecology in order to survive, right?
There's no balance between the concern we don't have for the many ecologically damaging things humans do for profit and the nagging when we think about intervening with a disease that killed millions.
But that is beside the point and does not matter. What matters are 700,000 human lives annually.
It's tragic really. If we had these diseases in Europe or North America, we would have already done this.
Besides, his statement isn't an argument, and present no facts or information.
> Imbecilic remark. Do you know how many humans would die if we eliminated mosquitos? Any idea?
petters also appears to be correct on what would happen if we had these issues in North America. Your own province kills mosquitos en masse and those ones aren't even carrying deadly disease they are just a nuisance.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/deltamethrin-first-u...
Re: Manitoba, spraying to reduce mosquito populations in urban areas is a whole different ball game from extermination.
We humans have a long, long "tradition" of exterminating species and we know it will not affect things that really matter to us, like agriculture and water. The number of human deaths will be effectively zero.
Ecosystems adapt. The things eating mosquitoes would find something else to eat, or maybe not. Some species will grow their population, some will reduce. Some species will evolve a bit differently.
The idea that everything will collapse if we eradicate mosquitoes or pandas is just absurd (I have nothing against pandas by the way; I'm just observing that them disappearing did not collapse everything).
Is this actually a thing?
Humanity wipes out species by the dozens each year for no reason and people shrug, but for some reason many people don't want to target the few subspecies that are actually extremely harmful to humans.
First test it on a small isolated island.
I think the main reason people don't like camping or nature is because of mosquitos and biting ants. This dislike of outdoors converts directly to a lack of environmentalism. I don't know the conversion rate, so who knows how much more we'd care for nature minus mosquitos, but if we're destroying the planet either way, we should at least enjoy some part of life without these parasites.
Saber tooth tigers. Check. Dire wolves. Check.
The environment adapted just fine to the loss of these species.
The 1000s of other species made extinct recently... Oops!
...But again, the natural ecosystem didn't irrecoverably collapse.
After eliminating so many much more valuable or interesting species (IMO), I certainly don't want to stop right when we're getting to ticks and mosquitoes.
Well this is the law of unintended consequences in action. Many people don't think it will have any negative effect but we don't know. Nature is extraordinarily complex and disrupting it in such a huge way almost always carries knock-on impact.
What we do know is that mosquitos have killed more humans than probably anything else ever. Shouldn't that be impetus enough to actually do something about it? Of course, the problem is made worse by the fact that the people who are advocating against doing anything aren't the people that mosquitos are killing. If you knew a lot of people who had died from Malaria, you might be singing a different tune.
It's also a straw man. I didn't say we're "too stupid" to "ever know anything." So let's at least engage in good faith.
Should we "do something?" Sure. And we have, for centuries. Did you miss anti malarial drugs, physical detriments and mitigations?
"Advocating against doing anything" is another gross straw man argument.
and a specialist working for an oil company convinced me that climate change happens all the time. he wasn't technically wrong, except that he wasn't around to enjoy those other times to attest that it would be "no big deal".
There's no way it would happen via natural selection. The mosquito is engineered to die. The project has to keep releasing new genetically engineered mosquitos to mate with females.
I totally get the idea that removing all mosquitos would likely lead to spiralling ecosystem collapse, and it's possible that even killing this one species could do so.
But, are you arguing that trying to kill this one species could kill all mosquito species? I just don't see how that's possible with this mechanism.
Please beware of this infection and get the medication even if it has strong side effects.
When I travelled to Kenya last year my wife and I took malaria medication, we would do the same if going to a malaria area in SA in summer.
I don't know if travel agencies act similar outside of NZ.
There are going to be a ton of secondary effects due to prematurely closing or clearing out hospitals and clinics, and many people have already died from completely preventable illnesses, with some clinics telling people to not come in when they should have.
[0]: https://unherd.com/thepost/professor-karol-sikora-fear-is-mo...
For example the US Preventative Task Force evaluates evidence and recommends screening guidelines as well as giving the strength of the evidence.
For breast cancer, the only recommended screening is that women age 50 to 74 have mammograms every 2 years. And that is B grade evidence.
https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/recomme...
With screenings, you have to be really careful about selection bias. Basically, screening will catch a larger proportion of slow growing cancer. Also with respect to staging, the slower growing a cancer, the earlier the stage you will catch it at.
My guess would be that if you have a cancer that is rapidly going from stage 1 to stage 2, you would already have a worse outcome and the 2 months screening hiatus is not going to be that big a difference maker.
EDIT:
In case people ask about clinical breast exams and self breast exams, here are the American Cancer Society guidelines:
"Research has not shown a clear benefit of regular physical breast exams done by either a health professional (clinical breast exams) or by women themselves (breast self-exams)."
https://www.cancer.org/cancer/breast-cancer/screening-tests-...
So the only guidelines with evidence backing them up call for 2 year screenings. Within that framework, a 2 month delays are not going to be very clinically significant.
Do women normally have breast exams every few months?
Some presumably fairly predictable fraction would have an exam scheduled during the beginning of the epidemic, and a certain fraction of them would have undiagnosed cancer. It seems reasonable to assume significant negative consequences for those people.
A self-exam once a month is one of those "good hygiene" things, though, and might be a decent idea to promote right now while people are getting cagey.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/05/us/coronaviru...
The key phrase if you want to learn more is "excess deaths"
This excess death mechanism has the potential to be very severe in very poor countries, where famine is likely to follow this plague. It's really quite sad.
I've been part of many miscarriages and doctors can tell you something is wrong but rarely can they fix anything before 12 weeks.
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/statistics
From delayed diagnostics, to "elective" surgeries that can't take place, to suicides. It's going to be on the order of the direct deaths at least.
The only real measurable indirect improvement is a lot less people dead in traffic accidents.
Possibly. And many will interpret this as the cure being "worse of (or as bad as) the disease".
But what we should really be comparing this to is the number of deaths we'd have if we didn't do anything to reduce the spread.
Anybody has good simulation data that takes into account what we learned so far?
But regardless none of it is any good for anyone.
Although both mechanisms would bear some relation, it looked to me more like it was driven by spread of the infection rather than changes to behavior.
The point that you can't really separate them completely is well-taken though.
EDIT: I'm clearly all over the place with terminology. Something along the lines of looking at the (all_cause_mortality - covid_deaths - historic_avg) residual and seeing how closely it mirrors say alpha*covid_deaths where alpha is some constant. If it mirrored it well (or for example preceded it and the lock downs in the manner that would be expected of infection) one might infer that those deaths were probably covid. If on the other hand they were strictly related to the time the news broke and lock downs and changes to hospital admittance rates, then it might be better explained as resulting from lockdown issues.
Yea absolutely. I haven't seen yet seen any analysis that does this, but I'm sure one will come along soon
I feel sad to hear
The idea is to create modified mosquitoes that can't bite or breed and release them to "breed" with the general populous thus neutralizing them.
Otherwise this reminds me of well-meaning efforts to control erosion by planting Kudzu or Himalayan Blackberry everywhere. Ultimately they just become an invasive species. And I could also see eradicating mosquitoes as removing a food species for many other animals. This is a really bad idea.
>We conclude that predators and parasites have a limited but significant effect on overall mosquito populations, and their role should be considered when implementing habitat management, mosquito control and when modeling mosquito population dynamics.
From a study http://e-m-b.org/sites/e-m-b.org/files/European_Mosquito_Bul...
The problems eradication solves are obvious and important to solve.
The problems eradication might cause are less obvious and are potentially disastrous.
Many of the mosquitos are invasive species anyway. The point being, there are many many of species which would fill up the ecological niche left if we extincted a few.
Next to that it's not only the side effect of extinction of one species, but also the unforeseen side effects of the technologies used to accomplish this (extreme) extinction.
The whole point of technologists is that they really have to much faith that we both understand these complex ecosystems and complex technologies we just started using.
To try to put a technology on grand scale that you don't fully understand and can't control once in the wild is really stupid.
I really want to believe that doing this would be something that humans should explore, but I think the chance of something going wrong is fairly high. Considering our rather terrible track record with stuff like this (weapons, pesticides, etc).
It often takes decades to truly see how it works, so while we may end the mosquitos problem we may make ourselves a worse one.
Also, the mosquito lifecycle is as little as a week or two from egg to egg. The process would be rather fast.
https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf - review by GiveWell, and independent charity evaluator
$2 donation results in 1 net that lasts 3-4 years protecting 1.8 people on average from malaria $3
I haven't read it, but a recent review (https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n11/steven-shapin/drain-the-..., possibly behind a paywall) suggested Sonia Shah's The Fever to be a better book on the topic.
The second big factor is what it would need to develop. This isn’t a directed process - something needs to confer a benefit of some sort early to be selected for, not just after hundreds of generations. If you’re talking about a major change like completely changing mammalian skin, that sounds very complicated compared to other things (such as improved immune function for the specific disease killing people), and there’s an arms race if all you’re doing is selecting for mosquitoes with better bites which might not be winnable.
Finally, there’s the question of downsides: do the mutations producing this leave you more vulnerable to other conditions, less likely to attract mates, etc. If that tough skin costs more to grow, you’re paying the cost upfront even if you’re living somewhere without a huge mosquito population, so it might be maladaptive for too much of the total population to maintain.
The downsides discussion is particularly relevant in the case of sickle cell anemia, which is believed to be a side effect of an evolved malaria resistance – beneficial if you live in an area where it’s common but a net loss if you do not:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20450-how-sickle-cell...
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-insects-die-from-people-stepp...
I wouldn't be surprised if birds and spiders kill far more insects than people.
If you count things like pollution, pesticides, land use, they absolutely don't.
Insect populations have been reduced to a fraction of their former size over the last few decades due to human activity.
> True, this tiny insect does not do the job on its own. What makes it so dangerous is its capacity to transmit viruses or other parasites that cause devastating diseases.
If you catch Covid-19 from a kiss, we don’t say the other person killed you. We firmly blame the disease not the person who transmits it. “Well your honor, Sally didn’t do it on her own, it was her capacity to transmit viruses or other parasites. But mostly her.”
These all seem communicable, but we don’t blame humans:
“Lower respiratory infections remained the most deadly communicable disease, causing 3.0 million deaths worldwide in 2016. The death rate from diarrhoeal diseases decreased by almost 1 million between 2000 and 2016, but still caused 1.4 million deaths in 2016. Similarly, the number of tuberculosis deaths decreased during the same period, but is still among the top 10 causes with a death toll of 1.3 million. HIV/AIDS is no longer among the world’s top 10 causes of death, having killed 1.0 million people in 2016 compared with 1.5 million in 2000.”
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the-top-10-...
Yes if you infect someone intentionally that’s different, but the mosquito isn’t trying to kill you.
From the article:
> (humans by the way are second behind the mosquito, causing 475,000 deaths every year)
If it’s not humans killing when we transmit, then it’s not mosquitoes. If the transmitter is involved then humans crush mosquitoes.
[0]https://healthclinics.superdrug.com/is-malaria-contagious/
And yet, we never seem to hear this fact on the News...
Yet we do get stories of the form "X killed Y people", where X is some person/group/phenomenon, and Y < 725,000...
And usually, Y is not just less, but several orders of magnitude less -- than 725,000...
Also... if you happen to leave a window open at night (accidentally, not intentionally, I might add!), and a mosquito should happen to get in -- does that make you an "accessory to murder" ?
?
Not sure where you get your news but I’ve heard this mentioned regularly on NPR in coverage about the impacts of climate change, outbreaks, programs testing things like the genetically-engineered sterile mosquito releases, and local programs which are trying to reduce it even if it’s not a high cause of death in the United States. Remember when Zika got heavy coverage?
Most likely because A. it disproportionally impacts poorer people in far-off countries and B. It's harder to sell as an enemy/scapegoat compared to other humans/groups/foods/illnesses
My sister got caught in one of them. Not fun. She was covered in the little bastards.
1. What is the distribution of this number across geographical regions? Is it uniformly spread across all regions? Are some regions outliers?
2. The distribution of this number over time of the year in every geographic region is perhaps an interesting thing to look at for short-term solutions.
What do folks in malaria country do? Scavenge their childrens' mosquito nets to catch fish etc. Reject modern medicine and go to the local quack. Foul their water supplies and poach their endangered species.
I know, we can have all the morals we can afford. But some large-scale coordinated actions require a populace that is educated and willing.
Wendover did a great video on risk recently:
Fortunately with study we will beat it. But to laugh at the risk of Covid is foolhardy.
If we are including diseases why not count bats?
Insects as a whole are of crucial planetary importance.
clickbait
> 18.08.2017
why haven't we been in lockdown every year until this deadly scourge has been exterminated?
and no, it's not that the current pandemic was more uncertain. even by january/february, it was clearly less contagious and deadly than the 1918 flu. we had good bounds on potential trajectory by early march, when many lockdowns were being implemented.
You do know that mosquitoes have wings and can move from place to place without humans right?
So when you have a cheap solution that works, why would you want to do something expensive that does not even work any better than the cheap solution?
Other than making a nonsensical ideological statement, that is.
covid is trending toward the same death rate. therefore, we should lock down against mosquitos to be consistent.
i get it, cognitive dissonance sucks, but "nonsensical ideologies" indulge in the panic and anxiety rather than fortifying your resolve against the hysteria. your fear is someone else's power.
Ehh, not exactly. I used to live in Africa, parts where there were tstsi flies and mosquitos. Despite being given nets by the Gates foundation, people rarely used them. Well, some used them as hair nets, others through them away because their pastors convinced them their purpose was to sterilize the African people, etc etc.
Probably because 700k/year is globally, while the US alone has suffered 100k deaths in 3 months.
And no mosquito outbreak has caused entire hospital systems to collapse in various parts of the world.
Dengue is way more serious than COVID19. Particularly worrisome, having had dengue makes subsequent reinfections more life-threatening, not less.
There are ways to eradicate the mosquito -- mainly getting rid of small clear water containers near/within your home, such as vases and empty plant pots -- but we still don't do it until it's too late and becomes a problem. A single neighbor who doesn't do this endangers the whole block. And the authorities don't give a fuck. It's infuriating, really.
So to rephrase your question, why don't we do something about it? It's way more actionable than COVID19 (though lockdowns don't work for the reasons others told you). So who knows?
You seem to be strangely unaware of the large amount of money which has been spent for decades on mosquito control by individuals and all levels of government. There are widespread control campaigns, active research into developing new weapons (e.g. traps which are effective against tiger mosquitoes), and community awareness to get more people involved with habitat control and using things like bed nets.
I mean, does this sound like not doing something?
https://www.epa.gov/mosquitocontrol/success-mosquito-control...
Several companies have been working for years on genetic modifications to disrupt mosquito spread:
https://e360.yale.edu/features/genetically_modified_mosquito...
Which government are you talking about? I don't live in the US and you linked to EPA and Yale. I can tell you my government is doing very little to combat dengue fever, and when they do, it's too little, too late.
> widespread control campaigns [...] community awareness
There's very little of that. And one careless neighbor effectively endangers the whole apartment block.
Recent birthday party, 20 people, every single one caught the disease.
Hospital systems would collapse because of the number of sick people. Doctors and nurses would be missing because they would almost all likely fall sick.
And people who would not die of COVID would die of other stuff because healthcare systems would have collapsed.
This is what happened in Italy. This is what was happening in NYC for a few days at its worst. This is what is about to happen in Brazil and possibly in India.
I read just a couple of days ago that the IFR (infection fatality rate) is only ~0.25%-0.3%? Still ~four times higher than that of the flu, but not ten times greater.
One does not simply question the official corona narrative here without being censored by downvoting or flagging.
But answering your question: that's because such scenario was not developed and funded. Yet.