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Comment by mimixco | Hacker News Reader

It is simply untrue that there are no other options. There are many options. GMO mosquitos are another unwanted product from Intrexon which specializes in GMO foods that failed in the market (GMO apples and salmon).

I lived in the Keys during the first attempt at this trial and there is so much wrong with it, we put together a whole website at the time. This page talks about Wolbachia, a safer and already approved alternative: https://neveragainkw.wordpress.com/2016/10/16/wolbachia-read...

Any mention of mosquitos in the Florida Keys should come with the disclosure that the FKMCD (Mosquito Control District) is the single best funded entity in the entire state of Florida. There is serious money to made here and Intrexon/Oxitec only has to sell to one customer at a time -- the District -- not the people who live there.

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From your link: "Oxitec’s GMO mosquitoes do not have any built-in disease suppression and they aren’t truly sterile, meaning Oxitec GMO mosquitoes can also bite human beings and transmit disease"

But isn't Oxitec only releasing males? Male mosquitos don't bite.

See item #2 on this page: https://neveragainkw.wordpress.com/2016/09/13/5-way-the-medi... (that version has links... here's the text)

2. The Famous “Only Male Mosquitoes” Story

That may be the goal, but it’s not the reality. At best Oxitec can sort out about 99.98% of the females. That sounds terrific until you realize that even the Key Haven test requires releasing over 14 million mosquitoes. The company expects to be able to come 3x a week for 22 months to tend to the breeding containers.

Even the suggestion that the GMO mosquitoes are “bred to mate females” is misleading. In actuality, the GMO mosquito, crippled as it is by artificial DNA, does a poor job of mating. Unsurprisingly, wild type female mosquitoes don’t particularly prefer it. So Oxitec has to overwhelm the natural system with 5-25 times as many artificial mosquitoes as natural ones. The company’s tests in the Cayman Islands showed an effect on population only after massive, repeated GMO mosquito releases. The Oxitec GMO mosquito is its own Neverending Story.

Even with 25 times as many „artificial“ mosquitoes, the 0.02% females remaining are probably still a tiny amount compared to the naturally occurring ones.

Why can't they do both? Seems pretty short sighted to be against new technology for no good reason.

Because GMO mosquitos introduce unnecessary risks. This is the best summary that I wrote at the time:

https://neveragainkw.wordpress.com/2016/09/05/5-things-you-m...

It's of note that the project is so unpopular in the Keys that they have had to move from a Keys-wide trial covering thousands of homes to an opt-in only test with 130 houses. In other words, the people who live there don't want to be part of the experiment.

> No one can know the effects of Oxitec’s artificial DNA entering the human bloodstream through mosquito bites

I'm still not sure I understand the problem. This entire experiment feels like a much safer version of the time the USA released a massive amount of DDT to end polio transmission [0]. DDT is obviously horrible for humans, but now we also live in a country without polio. There are costs to everything. Nothing is perfect.

Please provide better evidence than "having non-natural DNA in your blood is bad".

[0] - https://academic.oup.com/envhis/article/22/4/696/4057684

I wrote a whole website about this, so I'm not really down to debate it with you. There's a lot to read about this, including source documents from Oxitec and the FDA. You can draw your own conclusions from the evidence that's there.

Not everyone has the time to read "a whole website," nor is everyone inclined to if you are unwilling to clear up a seemingly unscientific concept (DNA from GMO entities ending up in our genome).

Except that the DDT probably had little to no effect on the transmission of Polio, and the real reason we live in a country without polio is that we've got a vaccine against it.

Malaria was endemic in the US prior to the National Malaria Eradication Program, which used DDT.

Malaria is a completely different disease than Polio. Thanks.

Right, I didn't add any context in my first comment, but the point is that DDT and mosquito control were an important component of disease control in the United States, regardless of whether polio is relevant to the discussion or not.

That's exactly what my comment was about though, polio isn't relevant.

DDT is not "obviously horrible for humans". That's dubious. It has not been proven to be carcinogenic and is only listed as "probable".

Polio isn't spread by mosquitos. I think you're confusing it with something else.

Hello from Miami. Sorry but your assessment is just a luddite fallacy. You point out potential harm without acknowledging any potential benefits. It's clear to me that the potential benefits massively outweigh the potential harms.

The potential harms you point out are tiny compared to the millions of lives ruined and hundreds of thousands of deaths caused each year by malaria.

> hundreds of thousands of deaths caused each year by malaria.

I might be missing something..there are people dying of malaria in Florida?

Or you're saying that doing the test in Florida will help to get this technology to places where malaria is common?

Put another way, are there in potential benefits for the people living in the testing sites?

> Put another way, are there in potential benefits for the people living in the testing sites?

The submitted article mentions Zika in the first paragraph. So reducing Zika cases spread by mosquitos is one potential benefit.

I'm all for reducing the EEE in the Greater Boston Area, too.

There are only four species of mosquito that bite humans. They are a tiny part of the food chain, and would be completely replaced by other food sources.

It's also not the first time humans have successfully made this kind of intervention.

Here's an article from 2016 about the same thing (it even mentions Oxitec): https://slate.com/technology/2016/01/zika-carrying-mosquitoe...

(I believe it was posted to HN a while back, but the article stuck with me as we don't dare enjoy the outdoors here for fear of our child getting Eastern Equine Encephalitis: https://www.cdc.gov/easternequineencephalitis/index.html )

Yes, because of Zika and dengue as other commenters have mentioned.

But that shouldn't really matter. We should fight for a system where obviously-good work can be done even if NIMBYs don't directly benefit from the work. If we're forced into we're forced into talking about how to placate/bribe Florida residents, then we've already lost.

This species of mosquito spreads yellow fever, dengue, zika, chikungunya, and several other diseases. Malaria-carrying mosquitos are in another genus.

And yeah, people absolutely do die from those, and even if they don't, they are horrible diseases that can produce long-term health effects.

The case fatality rate for yellow fever is 15-50% (I'm guessing strongly dependent on whether the victim has access to modern hospitalization).

https://www.who.int/csr/resources/publications/yellowfev/CSR...

The article said they were trying to combat dengue, and that it affected about 60 people.

This research is a proof-of-concept for future work on a larger scale.

AquaBounty's GMO salmon hasn't "failed in the market"... it literally hasn't hit the market yet, but is still being actively developed, despite unending environmentalist lawsuits.

"Safeway, Kroger, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, Target, and Aldi are among the retailers who will not sell [Intrexon's GMO salmon]." [0]

[0] Source: https://www.seafoodsource.com/news/foodservice-retail/here-a...

That article is from 2015. I would not interpret that as writ.

To summarize your blog, your biggest gripe is that it might not work, and that doing a test that may not work isn't worth the risk because "GMO bad".

Jesus Christ, millions of people have malaria, it's a life-ruining disease. This is some of the worst luddite nonsense I've ever read.

I don't get the GMO-bad crowd. Before GMO crops, you would take seeds and irradiate them. Then plant them and see what interesting mutations happen. And somehow GMO is worse than that? SMH

In the Florida Keys?

You broke the site guidelines badly here. Please follow the rules, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry about that, thanks for the warning.

Appreciated!

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