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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

Dengue fever is a serious disease and it’s not rare in Singapore, there were 40,000+ cases in 2020 which is pretty high for a population of 5M.

If they stopped their mosquito control efforts it would be disastrous for human health.

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Wouldn't a healthier ecosystem better handle mosquitoes, though? Predators of mosquitoes are bats, birds, fishes, frogs…

A healthy ecosystem in Singapore will be chock-full of mosquitoes and no humans.

The island started out as a swamp.

Sometimes I think mother nature just looks at people shaking her head quoting the line from Last Crusade, "you chose poorly" on selecting where to live.

And yet 5 million humans swarmed in and Singapore is among the highest nominal GDP countries in the world. Shows that there's little hope bringing balance between humanity and other species in the current economic system.

Well it wasn't 5M until recently. And one could argue that putting 5M people into a tiny island is being efficient with space, leaving vast swaths of Malaysia untouched (where it wouldn't be if Singapore wasn't so dense).

Fun fact: Singapore's equivalent to Disneyland, the island of Sentosa (home to Universal Studios etc), used to be called "Pulau Blakang Mati", or "Island of Death from Behind", because of its incredible malaria rates.

What makes you think a "healthy" ecosystem isn't deadly for humans? I mean, malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever are all natural parts of the ecosystem.

And, ironically, other insects (for example, dragonflies) which are also killed by the fogging. What's more, the predatory insects usually have a much longer life-cycle, so after a fogging the mosquitos will come back long before their predators. Thus, once you start fogging, you have to keep doing it or you'll end up with more mosquitos than before.

I've actually seen this happen... ok, my observation is purely anecdotal and has no scientific validity, but the effect I observed was pretty dramatic. Where I live in South America dengue is also endemic, and during some particularly bad Dengue outbreaks a few years ago the city government did some extensive one-shot fogging. Immediately afterward there were practically no mosquitos at all for a few weeks and reduced numbers for some months. But thereafter for at least 6 months to a year everybody complained that the mosquitos were worse than ever (mostly without making any connection to the insecticide fogging, they just complained the way people complain about the weather).

There are alternatives, like the release of genetically engineered male mosquitos.

That still remains to be seen, right? Wasn't the first release of gmo mosquitos only recently in Florida?

No, there were several earlier trials. I think there were issues in scaling up the mosquito modification process.

There is a very scalable process. You breed mosquitoes, about half of which have the gene you're after (so the population isn't infertile). You have machines that can sort them very quickly, and you only release to the wild the infertile male ones. I made a sorting machine that can sort 10 larvae per second - it's all just computer vision looking at their microscopic balls!

Reach out to Tom Scott (I'm serious, he is very responsive to e-mails) and he'll probably make a video about this, especially if you are in the UK like your name suggests. I know I would love to see it.

Sick, thanks for the process details. Are there plans for larger releases? if not, do you know what is preventing that from moving forward?

Singapore has been trialing as well that since 2016. It's safe to say they haven't solved the problem yet.

https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/nea-release-wolbachia-...

False dichotomy

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