We're a hair's breadth away from using genetic engineering to make the mosquito extinct.
We have the technology (gene drive) but scientists just aren't sure if we should do it.
We have the technology (gene drive) but scientists just aren't sure if we should do it.
Ecologically, they can normally be replaced by some of the 3460 others.
There was an island where they used poison to kill all the mosquitoes because it was a big problem. All the mosquitoes dies and then all the things that ate the mosquitoes died.
And then all the things that ate things that ate mosquitoes died. And it went through a few more layers of this, like some modern day version of the Biblical plagues.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. It just means it is correct to not take the decision lightly.
(Unfortunately, I've never found a good write up of this true story on the internet. I read it long ago back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I had a bright yellow rotary phone and got information printed on dead trees.)
Including helping people who live in poverty to have better housing and medicine so their less susceptible to Malaria ?
Not to mention the ethical (regarding equity) concerns: disease from mosquitoes affects poverty-stricken areas the most, yet the people with the most access to these bodily modifications or procedures are going to be from wealthy countries.
My understanding is that a lot of the diseases we want to kill mosquitoes for are also more likely to affect people in developing countries.
Of the ones that do, many of are of African origin -- they evolved there along with us (and the diseases they carry). They are thus essentially invasive species in the rest of the world.
The nice thing about potentially using CRISPR-based gene drives to extirpate (e.g.) Aedes aegypti is that it would affect only that species, unlike our current pesticides which tend to kill insects of many different species indiscriminately.
Scientist who are eager to take out mosquitos sound more like kids who are eager to play with their new gene drive rather than consider the actual impacts.
No operation warp speed to help save hundreds of thousands of lives a year. It's almost just like a fun topic to make people feel better about themselves.
I've read more about how transmission of malaria works and basically mosquitoes carry it from biting infected humans then pass it to other humans, it's not that mosquitos are evil, they don't even know what's going on.
I think there is a question of ethics involved personally, that's because if mosquitoes had the power to wipe us out, we wouldn't be that happy if they decided to go ahead with the plan.
Saving lives is generally a strong motivator, so it's worth considering the possibilities.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/18/health/asian-tiger-mosquitoes...
The eradication of malaria helped Sardinia improve its public health programs and also paved the way for socio-economic development. But at a huge environmental cost that is incalculable. Some farmers accused the DTT of killing their livestock, bees and also fish.
https://totalsardinia.com/malaria/
Sheepherders, fish farmers, and beekeepers blamed their dead sheep, dead fish, and dead bees on DDT spraying.
https://www.wanderingitaly.com/blog/article/785/sardinia-and...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2819864/
Edit: Odds are good I read about it originally in Reader's Digest in the late 1970s or early 1980s if you want to find a dead tree copy at a library.
The citation you provided elsewhere (for Sardinia) was for some DDT spraying - which was obviously not targeted exclusively at mosquitoes, and explains why lots of other things died.
Targeting the very small set of mosquito species (that carry malaria) with something that will wipe them out within a few generations (under 12 months) seems tremendously safe, because a) it's a small subset of the total mosquito population, b) you can test this in isolated (eg. island) environments, and c) by the very nature of this, rollback is easy -- once the species has died out locally, if needed you can quickly & safely re-populate with non-modified specimens.
I'm an environmental studies major and I have a genetic disorder. I'm getting healthier when that is supposed to be impossible and it's in part because I'm an environmental studies major and I think of the body as a complex ecosystem.
You kill one thing or change one thing and there are always myriad knock on effects. Always. Anytime you do anything that's actually at all effective, there is hell to pay.
I am getting better by trading short term costs for long term gains, the exact opposite of what Western medicine typically does. We monetize disease by trading short term gains -- that doctors can claim credit for, justifying their fees -- for long term costs which we politely admit to with multi-page warning materials included with all drugs and then normalize largely ignoring that stuff and taking it anyway. Then when your condition gets worse, they blame it on your genes instead of on the side effects of the harsh drugs they have been poisoning your system with for years and years.
It's possible to make targeted changes to an ecosystem, but it's not easy and even if you get it right, there are costs involved. Managing such change is hard and there tends to be hidden costs that the experts want to disavow responsibility for and they can generally get away with it because cause and effect can be hard or impossible to prove.
I hope they cure Sickle Cell. I hope they eradicate malaria. Parasitic infections are pretty awful.
I hope they do it in a way that doesn't involve millions of Africans being thrown under a bus so Westerners can feel like heroes while hand waving off the human costs for the locals which Westerners have a long history of running rough shod over on the excuse that we imagine we are superior to them or something.
I stand by my earlier claim.
While I acknowledge the potential of unintended consequences, and the often surprising interconnectedness of many elements within an ecosystem, I further dispute the claim that any change necessitates other, exclusively bad, 'hell to pay' changes.
Here I am, in rural Australia, and within a kilometre of me these are the pests that I would be ecstatic to get rid of, and that would have close to zero negative, and myriad positive, knock-on effects:
prickly pear, tiger pear, heliotrope, pattersons curse, foxes, rabbits, several species of med fruit fly & mosquitoes.
Almost all of these are guaranteed to have no negative knock-on effects simply because they were introduced here in the past two centuries.
Though the camel being introduced to Australia seems like something of a silver lining. From what I gather, Australia is now like a haven for the species.
Further afield from my humble abode, yes, Phytophthora, lantana, black rats, blackberry, feral goats / pigs / deer, cane toads, camels, etc.
The reason we can export camels to the middle east is that when we imported them from there, we didn't import the various parasites that are now rampant in that part of the world.
Perversely this gives us an export trade and a massively out of control population of highly destructive and resilient beasts.
If we could remove all wild camels from Australia over the space of 10 years you'd be hard-pressed to identify any net negatives, and certainly it'd be impossible to identify any negatives that were detectable when mapped onto a graph of the positive effects.
They are invasive species that exploded in Australia due to a lack of natural predators. How you can cite their existence as a refutation of anything I've said baffles me.
I've been up excessively long. With any luck, I'll be asleep soon.
Ciao.
I wasn't 'citing their existence', so much as declaring an eagerness to remove them.
The context was you started by saying:
> You kill one thing or change one thing and there are always myriad knock on effects. Always. Anytime you do anything that's actually at all effective, there is hell to pay.
I said that sounded alarmist, as there were plenty of contra examples - such as removing a dozen or so named non-indigenous pests from Australia.
You said:
> Australia is like the poster child for unintended ecological consequences. All those introduced species you cite to refute my opinion I would cite to support it.
I asked how that could sit alongside your claim that 'you kill one thing ... there is hell to pay'.
And here we are.
My point stands -- removing these introduced pests via a terminator gene or similar that targets precisely those organisms would be a fantastic result, and almost definitely have no negative effects, though of course I'd want that to be thoroughly evaluated.
An easy fallback option exists (re-introduction).
Just the first counter examples that comes to my mind: "Western medicine" eradicated smallpox and polio; what was the hell price for those?
"Western medicine" really only means medicine based on the scientific method, and shouldn't be conflated with the profit maximisation mechanisms which are so prevalent in the US medical system.
This is a known phenomenon. It's very well documented.
It's not a reason to keep letting people die, but the transition comes with costs.
That's just reality.
Antibiotics were supposed to be the end of disease. Now we are brewing antibiotic resistant infections.
It's common for diseases to jump species when adequately threatened. Organisms don't like being eradicated and will fight back.
You see more genetic mutations in diseases, fomenting resistance, when they are under pressure.
We've lost some of the medical best practices I grew up with. I have no idea if that's directly related to the eradication of small pox or polio. I haven't specifically studied those cases.
Change comes at a cost. That doesn't mean it isn't worth pursuing. It does mean that cavalier attitudes about how, clearly, this is all upside have a tendency to be dangerous.
Which practices are you referring to here?
At one time, the way we stopped STDs was we took the names of all your recent hookups, contacted them and let them know they had been with someone who had just tested positive for a particular STD and offered them testing and treatment.
In my teens, the AIDS crisis hit. In the US, it was mostly associated with gay men and IV drug users. These populations had reasonable concerns about giving a list of contacts to authorities and pushed for drug research and stronger privacy policies.
My understanding is we largely no longer use this proven method of stopping the spread of most STDs.
I can also remember going to a doctor with a sibling and a couple of cousins and all of us getting treated so that the issue wouldn't just go round and round through the family. I feel like that was a fairly common practice at the time and we mostly don't do stuff like that anymore.
Historically, doctors did house calls and were one of the smartest, best educated people in town and towns were relatively small. They could address issues that helped contribute to your medical problem beyond just prescribing drugs and surgeries.
Now we act like human beings are specimens in a petri dish and like their physical health is unrelated to their lifestyle or the fabric of their life.
I think this is a big problem. The phrase "We've thrown out the baby with the bathwater" comes to mind but doesn't quite fit.
What we've done is tossed aside wisdom and context to worship at the alter of ooh shiny diagnostics. The high tech diagnostics are useful but the largely unnoticed loss of wisdom and context is a serious problem and we aren't even trying to solve it because we mostly haven't noticed that it matters.
What's the hellish consequence of eyeglasses?
That's a misreading of my statement that talks about killing a thing in an ecosystem and thereby upsetting the balance of the ecosystem.
The (many) species of mosquito found in the Arctic do not carry malaria. Malaria is largely a tropical and subtropical disease.
What's to stop some random, non-scientist, group of people from just doing this? Mosquitos are pretty evil..
Hopefully whoever decides to just go do it has the sense to only target mosquitoes that preferentially feed on humans. Much less ecosystem impact that way.
These days, introducing a known mutation via a CRISPR gene drive is engineering. The hard part is scaling it so your mutation doesn't die out, testing to ensure that it is actually propagating, etc.
> Hopefully whoever decides to just go do it has the sense to only target mosquitoes that preferentially feed on humans.
You have to repeat a considerable amount work for every single target species. I highly doubt they'd target more than one.