A Massachusetts town closes its parks to stop a mosquito-borne disease
npr.org
npr.org
I don't know why we are dragging our feet on scaling this up. Are we too hung up on potentially erasing 10% of a bats diet?
One species trying to wipe out another species should be something that should be asked "is that what really needs to be done" before just doing it. Look at the buffalo for example. A group of humans were willing to wipe out an animal species to control a different group of humans. I don't care if it is "just" a mosquito. I do not think we full understand the repercussions of wiping out an entire species.
Every effin' year around 700k people (mostly children and old) die only from mosquito-borne ones, I presume ticks don't add that much on top of that. It cripples entire economies to halt, feeding massive disparities in the world set up by colonialism. Its a typical western privilege talking this style about matters not directly threatening lives of you and your closest ones.
I guess you would have a different opinion when say your mother would die during your childhood from it, or saw your sibling being disabled for life from early age by it.
Do similar people feel same sympathies towards syphilis or bubonic plague? Whether something is single celled or multicellular organism shouldn't make much difference.
(Now I'm wondering which scientist or zookeeper would preserve the last remaining specimens in captivity, and how, but that's a sidetrack.)
This is precisely the point. Just because you can't doesn't meant it isn't there. The hubris to think that just because the reason can't be seen right now with the limited information available at the time of decision means everything will be fine is exactly my point of hesitation on any of these decisions.
We actually have studied this. We should do this.
Not with pesticide. With large populations of sterile males.
But think of the children of mosquitoes!
In this case, I'm willing to take that chance given the fact that malaria has killed around 5 billion people cumulatively over history.
You may be thinking of the relatively new gene-drive experiments. I believe these are mainly focused on Aedes aegypti, which is the biggest vector for many human diseases. Aedes aegypti is a non-native invasive species in the Americas (and many other parts of the world). But the disease discussed in this article (Eastern equine encephalitis) is spread by native mosquitoes including Culiseta melanura.
I expect that many people who are okay with eliminating invasive species will be more hesitant about eliminating native ones, even harmful ones. On the other hand, we’ve long been eliminating mosquitoes in populated areas with the lower-tech methods discussed above. (Not to mention killing off countless other plant and animal species every year unintentionally/neglectfully.)
Mosquitos suck, literally, and I despise them, but they are a critical link in the ecosystems they live in.
Everybody wants to save the bees because they make honey and aren't assholes like Wasps, but bees are far from the only pollinators.
Without Mosquitos, a lot of animals a few steps up the food chain suffer, including bats, birds, larger insect predators like dragonflys, but also frogs and fish.
Female mosquitos are the ones that are most problematic, since they need to consume blood for nutrition for reproduction, but mosquitos also consume nectar and are pollinators.
Wiping out mosquitos would probably be achievable, but it would also kick the ladder out from under ecosystems that are already extremely fragile at a time when we are in the middle of the largest extinction event in human history (and potentially mammalian history, depends how far the holocene extinction proceeds).
I am also unfamiliar with how they are planning on taking them out. we need to make sure there isn't collateral damage or hardening the genetic strength of mosquitos
Like "Murray Gell-Man Amnesia", usually when I see public advice in MSM about something I know (e.g., computers), it's mostly wrong, and to the exclusion of good advice. And this smells like that.
Also suspicious is that protocol is missing. For example, how do you use bug spray, where on body, do you really need it every time you go outside, when do you wash it off and how, what about clothing, why do only sometimes they say not to use such-and-such spray on children and pregnant/nursing women (but other times they don't), does advice differ for urban vs. rural, what are the side effects or adverse interactions to know, etc.
Do they think people will read all the 6pt narrow speckled white on orange fine print on the package of whatever they buy? Do they not think that people will end up believing whatever essential oils MLM dropshipping influencer quackery and snake essential-oil they see on the Web?
1. Spray your clothes, not your skin.
2. If you don't want to overdo it, make sure in particular to spray your neck/collar, your cuffs/wrists, your ankles/socks/shoes. As you might imagine, most bugs get to your skin where it's exposed and get under your clothes at the openings, and the areas closer to the ground are more exposed.
3. Use Picaridin (sometimes called Icaridin). It needs to be a minimum 20% concentration by volume to be effective.
4. If you are willing, pre-treat your clothing with Permethrin 6+hrs prior to wear
5. If you are going to apply insect repellent directly to your skin, don't use a spray, use a lotion, sprays are for clothing.
6. Wear a hat that's been treated with Permethrin
That's pretty much it. If you do these things you'll be fine. Obviously you don't want to put repellent on your entire skin every day, but having your outer clothes treated with Permethrin and then putting a small amount of repellent lotion on your skin where your outer clothes have openings and wearing non-treated underwear/undershirt can do a lot and is relatively safe. DEET is very effective, but toxic to humans, and some insects are becoming resistant, Picaridin is similarly effective but with a shorter fall-off time (needs to be re-applied more often) and significantly lower toxicity and without natural resistance in the insect population.
Would you apply that same advice to walking in the city, in the middle of the day, in a state where some nasty mosquito-borne disease has been detected this year. Or would you modify the advice for that?
Realistically, the people who do not read the instructions literally on the side of the bottle they are applying to themselves are certainly not going to go back and pull up a news article they saw a day, week or month ago and try to get the instructions from there. Never mind how error prone that would be as each "repellent" chemical has different instructions and warnings (permethrin goes on clothes, while DEET goes on your skin for instance).
The insect repellent isn't just for mosquitos. DEET is fairly effective against ticks and black flies as well, neither of which is particularly fun to deal with. Whether you need to apply it or not depends a lot on the environment and climate but I always keep a bottle of DEET based repellent and Afterbite in the car just in case.
>Also suspicious is that protocol is missing. For example, how do you use bug spray, where on body, do you really need it every time you go outside, when do you wash it off and how, what about clothing, why do only sometimes they say not to use such-and-such spray on children and pregnant/nursing women (but other times they don't), does advice differ for urban vs. rural, what are the side effects or adverse interactions to know, etc.
There's more then one kind of repellent, and their delivery is going to change the formula as well; lotion isn't going to be be same formulation is an aerosol or manual spray, even if the repellent itself is the same. Is it any real surprise that there isn't going to be some universal direction for application with so much variety?
Read the bottle. Put it on. If you’re in an area prone to Lyme disease it’ll be far worse than any tiny degree of poison from bug spray.
Then you appended a supporting rationale that applies only to some people, in support of your advice.
So it's unclear whether you're speaking from a public health strategy, informed by expert knowledge on pertinent topics, and trying to minimize net harm over a large population, when you can use only a few broadcast words.
Or whether you have almost no idea what you're talking about, but are simply parroting your own interpretation of those few words you heard.
I'm speaking as the kind of person who was fine getting Covid vaccine, as soon as I heard doctors in general were giving it to their own families.
I'm asking why I keep seeing this particular blanket advice about bug repellent, and what does it actually mean.
For example, if we take some of the uses of this soundbite advice literally, it would imply that the situation is so dire that even incurring a population percentage of known adverse effects from people who will follow these instructions without reading the back of the bottle and second-guessing, is worthwhile.
I think I need a straight answer about what it means, from someone who knows what they're talking about, including about any public health and communications calculus involved.
You can do your own research if you want, but your personal opinion is of no importance to anyone and it’s not surprising that someone hasn’t hand delivered you a special report on an issue that most people consider mundane and not important.
If you’re wandering through woods that have equine encephalitis mosquitos and Lyme disease ticks then wear some bug spray. You don’t need the full toxicity report to build your priors that these really serious diseases are much more threatening than these extremely common products. MA has both of these and pretty much everyone here not living in a purely urban environment knows someone that has gotten seriously ill from Lyme. Nobody knows anyone that is seriously ill from bug spray.
If you’re going to be doing this every day, maybe consider putting some effort in, but otherwise just read the bottle. Your priors have to be so wildly distorted from reality for your line of argument here to be sensible.
> I'm speaking as the kind of person who was fine getting Covid vaccine, as soon as I heard doctors in general were giving it to their own families.
Sorry, but that’s a really stupid heuristic that implies your primary concern is that the doctors are lying to you. Paranoia, as I mentioned above.