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Comment by zucked | Hacker News Reader

Is that such a good idea? I find the idea of futzing with nature's systems in this way a bit concerning.

A hundred years ago, Malaria in the United States was bad enough to warrant a dedicated government office (It was folded into the CDC after WW2). This turned into a major eradication program through the use of DDT in the 1940's and by the 1950's Malaria was effectively eliminated from the states through the decimation of the mosquito population. Mosquitoes have of course rebounded over time, but malaria has not.

Mosquito release programs like this are now several decades old and have shown high efficacy with few environmental side effects where they have been tried. It is certainly more environmentally friendly than DDT. Meanwhile, the benefits are enormous and if done successfully in Africa could be directly measured in terms of human suffering.

Indeed, I just recently learned, this is why the CDC is in Atlanta:

> On July 1, 1946 the Communicable Disease Center (CDC) opened its doors and occupied one floor of a small building in Atlanta. Its primary mission was simple yet highly challenging: prevent malaria from spreading across the nation. Armed with a budget of only $10 million and fewer than 400 employees, the agency’s early challenges included obtaining enough trucks, sprayers, and shovels necessary to wage war on mosquitoes.

https://www.cdc.gov/about/history/index.html

If only the CDC would stick to work on communicable diseases

Their mandate changed. They are not the centre for disease control and prevention and they act in accordance with their mandate as a public health agency

I know this is a typo, but it reverses the meaning so clarifying for future readers in case it's confusing:

They are _now_ the centre for disease control and prevention

Yes, I know. I have friends there who are fantastic, smart, committed civil servants working within their mandate and structure. I have a Master's in Public Policy from the Kennedy School, I'm not anti-government. But mission creep has hurt the CDC more than helped the nation. Public health is far too big a remit for any one agency.

I'm confused I've never heard of it getting involved in anything else.

What do you mean?

Guns: https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/firearms/fastfact.htm...

I would tend to agree that they have no place talking about guns.

Collecting gun-related injury and fatality data allows us to make evidence-based informed decisions about what types of legislation are likely to be effective to reduce harm. For example:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-05/the-3-gun...

And that has nothing to do with Disease Control and is a clear demonstration of mission creep. The CDC has recently displayed its incompetence regarding its core function. Maybe it should master that before addressing other issues of society which are, at best, only tenuously in its purview.

Did they ask for this work or was it thrust on them because of political football?

You have many questions. At first it seemed as if you were curious about what other aspects the CDC had delved into. Now it looks like you are pursuing some agenda. The basic questions can be answered with a bit of research. Here are some more to ponder. Or maybe these are what you are getting at.

What was the CDC's original mission?

Did it execute it competently?

Why is it now involved in areas other than communicable diseases?

Do people in organizations seek to increase their power and influence?

Do they do this by enlarging the scope of their organizations' missions?

How is this notionally science-based entity being influenced by other factors?

Not exactly good faith here....

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24293489 - my sibling comment to yours might clarify my opinion for you...

I actually suspect this role was thrust on the CDC because they are generally supported by everyone (everyone sane anyway). I'm not a fan of this having happened because they should be too important to get mixed into politically poisonous debates.

I completely agree. There should be a government agency doing this. That agency should not be the CDC.

Well, don't they do other things that involve health? Like drinking guidelines and dietary guidelines and cancer research/information and things of that sort?

Still well within the realm of health and certainly affects communicable diseases (an unhealthy population is more prone to worse effects of disease).

Why? What do they do that you oppose?

Public health is precariously close to politics in a lot of cases and it casts shade on their mundane and universally appreciated work on topics more directly related to disease.

That said, it'd kind of inevitable that they run a course like that because constantly doing good non-controversial work banks political capital and the politicians are gonna try to harness organizations like that for their own ends.

So, because some folks make it political, we shouldn't get facts about things like the HPV vaccine or the effects of birth control methods?

How, exactly, are folks (who are not versed in medicine) supposed to get this information from a trusted source?

Question, why was DDT never tried in Africa if it was so successful in Florida and also in Italy after WW2? Why don’t we use DDT today? I’m curious to know the answers and have better understanding of the complexity of what makes eradicating malaria in Africa in the 21st century more complex than it was in the 1940’s and 50’s in other parts of the world.

We do. DDT has never been banned for disease control, it was banned for indiscriminate agricultural use and by that time resistance was already developing anyway.

Successful eradication in Florida and Italy was based on aggressive source control (stagnant water), control of re-importation, and use of insecticides (including DDT) for outbreak control.

Airborne spraying of more targeted larvicides continues to be used in Florida and other places.

Malaria rates in rural areas of Africa are much higher than urban areas so urbanisation also plays a role.

> why was DDT never tried in Africa

It was used in Africa, at least in 2016.

http://chm.pops.int/Implementation/DDT/DDTMeetings/DDTEG6201...

> Why don’t we use DDT today?

You mean for agriculture? Because using DDT for disease vector control was never internationally banned (only banned at the national level).

It's banned in agriculture because it kills stuff other than the mosquitoes. In particular, its use is restricted by the "Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants". Persistent Organic Pollutants are pretty much as bad as they sound, and DDT is one.

We don't use DDT today because of a book by Rachel Carson called Silent Spring.

http://www.rachelcarson.org/SilentSpring.aspx

Despite the environmental damage of DDT the Africans wanted to wipe out malaria first but were not able to purchase it in the quantities needed.

As late as 2004 leading newspapers editorialized that eradicating malaria in Africa outweighed the environmental damage

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/magazine/what-the-world-n...

What Wikipedia has to say about this:

> Carson has been targeted by some organizations opposed to the environmental movement, including Roger Bate of the pro-DDT advocacy group Africa Fighting Malaria and the libertarian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute; these sources oppose restrictions on DDT, attribute large numbers of deaths to such restrictions, and argue that Carson was responsible for them. These arguments have been dismissed as "outrageous" by former WHO scientist Socrates Litsios. May Berenbaum, University of Illinois entomologist, says, "to blame environmentalists who oppose DDT for more deaths than Hitler is worse than irresponsible." Investigative journalist Adam Sarvana and others characterize this notion as a "myth" promoted principally by Roger Bate of the pro-DDT advocacy group Africa Fighting Malaria (AFM).

> As late as 2004 leading newspapers editorialized that eradicating malaria in Africa outweighed the environmental damage

This doesn't make sense. Eradicating malaria in Africa is beneficial to the human species. Environmental damage applies to all other species. I don't understand how one could "outweigh" the other. They are just two different objectives.

Environment also includes the crops, the insects that pollinate the crops, the pests which eat the crops, the predators that keep the crop-eating pests under control, the fish…

We’re not (yet) beings of pure thought who can exist independent of our environment, so the damage to the environment does have to be counted before we decide if something is net-positive.

of course they are related. Take a preposterous example: draining the mediterranean sea would be an environmental disaster which we wouldn't do. But if it would forever end world hunger, poverty and disease we would do it. The trade-off changes.

It is devastating chemical, killing not only insects, but all kinds of other creatures. It is one of the reasons for the writing of "Silent Spring". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT

Some of the people promoting DDT drank spoonfuls of it to prove how safe it was, but it turned out to be very toxic to nature.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gtcXXbuR244

> DDT was less effective in tropical regions due to the continuous life cycle of mosquitoes and poor infrastructure. It was not applied at all in sub-Saharan Africa due to these perceived difficulties.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#Use_in_the_1940s_and_195...

jsinai asks>* Why don’t we use DDT today?*<

See "DDT":

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

We’ve been committing mass murder of mosquitos for decades and, as far as I know, nobody has ever found evidence that it’s problematic. Mosquitos seem to be one of the few truly unnecessary (and universally unwanted) bits of the natural order.

I've read that some bird populations might suffer, but even ecologists will admit that mosquitos aren't particularly vital to any one species, and the elimination of mosquitos as a primary disease vector may even be a net-positive for the animal world.

On top of that, only a small number of mosquito species carry malaria or dengue. Granted, I'm not sure how well we've studied cross-species fertility in mosquitoes (and thus risk of genetic solutions jumping the species barrier), but if we're able to very selectively exterminate this small number of species, my understanding is that the remaining mosquito species would expand to fill any ecological gaps.

Allegedly, there are only a few strains of mosquitos that bite humans/mammals. So if we remove those strains, the other ones will take their place.

I genuinely don't know the answer to this, but are they not a significant source of food for any predator such that their elimination wouldn't be noticed?

I'm reluctant to be playing god on this front, especially in light of the fact that it seems like the insect population is not doing well, globally, and forms the base for a complex food chain.

Did you not read the parent comment that you're?

For decades we have been performing a semi-eradication effort for mosquitoes for decades, and we have not noticed a substantial change that can be considered a result of that.

I understand hesitation to muck with nature, but I think it's sort of a privileged position to have when you live in an area where malaria and West Nile are not a serious risk. Malaria kills a lot of Africans every year (400,000+ [0]), and I'm not sure how much hesitation I'd have towards eradication if anyone in my family died from it.

[0] https://www.who.int/gho/malaria/epidemic/deaths/en/

The majority of mosquitoes don't seek out the humans. We attack the mosquitoes that seek out the humans.

Bat eat mosquitoes

That’s more something bat enthusiasts say to get people to like the critters. In reality insectivorous bats primarily eat larger, easier to catch prey like moths.

Given the small size of mosquitoes, restrictions imposed on prey detectability by low frequency echolocation, and variable field metabolic rates, mosquitoes may not be available to or profitable for all bats. [1]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3795000/

Sure, some do. But I don't think any bats eat only mosquitoes. As long as there are enough insects to eat, I think they'll be fine.

Humans have been “futzing with nature’s systems” and transforming or destroying ecosystems since the agricultural revolution, or before. This particular futzing is targeted, subject to careful scientific study, and if scaled out globally, has a fair shot at ending one of the greatest causes of human misery in the history of the world. What exactly are you concerned about?

I fall on the GMO is good side of the fence. I agree that careful science is far safer than the billion year "let's try random shit and see what sticks" experiment that nature runs. However, if I were to articulate my fears about experiments like these it would be to say that mankind's skill is a double edged sword. We've built a tool that quickly and effectively spreads and wipes out a species. That's the good side of the sword. In the off chance we messed up, missed something important... well now it's a quick and effective tragedy. That's the other side of the sword.

For me the equation is tilted pro-GMO because I see the alternative of letting nature run its course as a 100% certainty that a current tragedy continues to unfold.

So I'll continue to support GMO experiments like this. I just might have my fingers crossed, in case our D20 roll is bad and the kill gene jumps into the Zika virus and then into humans...

Genes don’t “jump” like that.

Sure they do:

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) or lateral gene transfer (LGT) is the movement of genetic material between unicellular and/or multicellular organisms other than by the ("vertical") transmission of DNA from parent to offspring (reproduction). HGT is an important factor in the evolution of many organisms

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

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/flesh-ea...

A similar story that I found absolutely amazing is the story of the screwworm and its eradication from the US. Not the whole world, mind you (which feels foolish long term).

I am not trying to make a point. This discussion made me think of it and I wanted to share.

By that logic, no modern technology should be adopted. However i am sure ecologists have studied in depth the impact this might have on the food chain or other dependencies and have mostly found mosquitoes to be completely useless and hopefully the test cases prove the same.

There are multiple kinds of mosquitos only a few carry human-infectious disease. It is my understanding that displacing Aedis Egypti (probably spelled wrong sorry) would not materially wipe out the ecological niche

The mosquitos that cause malaria are invasive and not native to Florida. Eradicating them is returning the environment to it’s pre invasive state.

We have done it successfully with screwworms: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/flesh-ea...

I'm OK to futz with nature to stop children dying.

See the "appeal to nature fallacy" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

In the words of Dr. Ian Malcolm of Jurassic park

"Life finds a way"

After recently re-watching the original Jurassic Park, I definitely agree with you :)

Malaria is nature too.

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