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US government approves 'killer' mosquitoes to fight disease
- nvahalik 9y agoThis sounds like one of those headlines that shows up before one of those movies like 28-days later. I'm all for trying to fight disease but how deeply do we actually understand what we're trying to solve. How do we know that we actually aren't going to make things worse down the road?
- joering2 9y agoWe make things worse down the road all the time. Its only that while the time goes by, we advance technologically to tackle on solving those things we made worst in the first place. Of course that makes things worse downER the road...
- freeflight 9y agoSolutions breed new problems
- sametmax 9y agoYeah, like the rabbits brits introduced in australia or the money... brits paid to kill snakes in india. That worked out so well. Wait a minute. Brits also created the US. The problem are not mosquitoes. It's the UK!
- learc83 9y agoRight now we're indiscriminately spraying pesticides that definitely have a harmful effect on the environment. All the evidence points to this being a better solution.
- dqpb 9y agoIt's important to keep these two questions separate: 1. Is it probably better than the current solution 2. What could go wrong The first being (probably) true does not negate the need to ask the second. The new option may have a completely different risk profile
- learc83 9y ago2 is necessary to answer 1 though, so they aren't really separate. If the cost benefit analysis of the new solution is worse because it has greater risks, then it can't be better than the current solution.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y agohttp://www.who.int/whr/1996/media_centre/executive_summary1/en/index9.html http://www.who.int/whr/1996/media_centre/executive_summary1/... Mosquitoes are responsible for millions of deaths every year, and hundreds of millions of infections often with severe disability. We understand stuff pretty deeply now. According to https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html eliminating mosquitoes would not cause major ecological issues. So when you have millions of people dying every year from a cause on one hand and only vaguely specified fears of some nebulous future harm, the reasonable and ethical thing to do is to do what you can to eliminate mosquitoes.
- jordan801 9y agoI'm excited to see what this does to the food chain. Will it collapse? Will it kill billions? Find out on the next episode of humans trying to manipulate everything.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jackhack 9y agoThe last episode, where the honeybee population collapsed, left me on the edge of my seat. I can't wait to see what happens next. edit: Seriously, wouldn't it be best to solve existing problems with direct threat to food production than to go off tinkering with new ideas and unknown side-effects?
- maxerickson 9y agoNote that honeybees are livestock. Their presence in the US is itself an example of manipulating the environment to our own ends.
- theptip 9y agoThe problem with this argument is that it's throwing out some big numbers and bad outcomes, without making any attempt to quantify the likelihood of those outcomes. Without quantification, this position is basically unfalsifiable. Plus, there's a trivial contrapositive that is just as valid: "what if allowing mosquitoes to live causes an outbreak of a new disease that is transmitted by mosquitoes and kills billions?". Sure, that could also happen. As with total food-chain collapse from reduction of population of a non-keystone species, it seems very unlikely. Contrast that against the almost-certain probability that 0.5m will die next year (0.1 Holocausts per year, or one Holocaust per decade) from malaria. If we don't attach a probability to these outcomes there's no way of having any sort of meaningful conversation about them.
- notyourday 9y ago> This sounds like one of those headlines that shows up before one of those movies like 28-days later. Maybe we will finally get better movies....
- maxander 9y agoI suspect that’s in large part because of the headline’s officious use of the term “US government” as the actor, not to mention the completely sensational description of the bugs as “killer.” Does “EPA approves release of infertile mosquitos” sound as scary? Because that’s what’s actually going on.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- saulrh 9y agoSomething like 30 out of the 500 anopheles species are capable of carrying malaria. Only 2 of those 30 bite humans: A. gambiae and A. funestus. Eradicating those two would be sufficient and another species, one that doesn't bite humans, would take over the rest of their niche. "Bites humans" is not a sufficiently beneficial adaptation to be a game-changer. We can eliminate that trait and precisely that trait with surprisingly little selective pressure. Most of the "whoops" tales we hear are people that didn't listen to their scientists telling them not to, didn't have scientists at all, or were from long enough ago that we can discard their stories as irrelevant in the same way that we'd discard things like "spaceflight is impossible" and "nukes will end war". We've now traced the food chain around malaria mosquitoes out to three or four degrees of separation, including things like their competitors, the diseases they carry, and the things they spread those diseases to. Their entire ecological niche is trivially replaced by close relatives that don't carry malaria to humans. They're not even common enough to have major food-chain or crowding effects like you'd see with ants, rabbits, kudzu, or sparrows. Everything that we can find says that the damage from eradicating these two species would be zero. Not "small", not "manageable". None. Malaria-carrying human-biting mosquitoes are small enough and unimportant enough that we should be thinking of them as disease organisms rather than insects. I'm sure you're perfectly happy with the eradication of bot flies, polio, and smallpox; why not A. gambiae and A. funestus?
- napa15 9y agoIt's fine being careful but this argument devolves all too often into some kind of religious nature worship. We are the dominant species on this planet. Animals and plant life - nature - have to conform to our wishes. Not the other way around.
- saulrh 9y agoI agree, more or less, but I believe that the "We can't possibly predict the effects of this therefore we can't take the risk" argument demands more urgent opposition. I argue that we can predict the effects. They're tiny even in absolute terms, and the uncertainty is well-understood and also small. And in relative terms - These small risks and effects are weighed against a half-million lives per year. I'd be willing to release kudzu or rabbits to save that many lives; eliminating mosquitoes has such insignificant risk relative to its benefit that that risk doesn't even register. Do it now.
- andrei_says_ 9y agoI am just wondering, are we about to discover what other insects etc. are being influenced by this decision, possibly with negative effects on a large scale? Makes me think of the four pests campaign. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign
- dmoy 9y agoThis case it's probably being done to recent invasive species... As in the ecosystem was fine before they came, and will be fine after they're gone again.
- komali2 9y agoTo be fair, depending on your definition of "fine," it could be fine now and it could be fine in the middle of an ice age.
- derefr 9y agoHow about: the ecosystem was the way humans nostalgically preferred it before the mosquitos came, and it'll likely be the way humans nostalgically preferred it again once they're gone.
- dmoy 9y agoNot just mosquitoes, this one specific type of invasive mosquito. There will still be many other mosquitoes after the wolbachia thingy is done. It doesn't work on most mosquitoes
- learc83 9y agoOur current solution is for trucks to drive down the road spraying pesticides everywhere. We know that kills far more than mosquitoes.
- Chardok 9y agoExcept this proposal is widely accepted in the scientific community with hundreds of ecological studies behind it, where as the Four Pests was just speculation by a guy who likely never studied any modern biology.
- dmoy 9y agoThis sounds like the wolbachia release of aedes egyptai mosquitoes that verily or w/e did in socal earlier in the year. Not so frightening, since it's just a sterilization technique using existing bacteria.
- QuercusMax 9y agoYou are correct. MosquitoMate (mentioned in TFA) is working with Verily's Debug: https://blog.verily.com/2017/07/debug-fresno-our-first-us-field-study.html https://blog.verily.com/2017/07/debug-fresno-our-first-us-fi....
- dec0dedab0de 9y agoThis is kind of like neutering/spaying feral cats, and returning them to where they were found. They stop breeding, but continue to compete with others for resources.
- strictnein 9y agoA mosquito's life is pretty short, on the order of a couple of weeks.
- eatbitseveryday 9y ago> This is kind of like neutering/spaying feral cats, and returning them to where they were found. They stop breeding, but continue to compete with others for resources. What resources are mosquitoes competing for in the environment?
- dec0dedab0de 9y agoMating partners... It's obviously not a one to one with cats, just a similar technique of population control via sterilization and release.
- partycoder 9y agoMao started a campaign to kill all sparrows because they eat the "grain of the people". Well, right after that, insects started proliferating, so then they had to exterminate all of them. Among the insects killed, pollinators died. So that region now looks completely Marsformed and now all agriculture required pollination by hand. Killing a species can start a slippery slope.
- josiahtu 9y agoSure but not all species play an equally critical role in the ecology.
- partycoder 9y agoInsects and fish eat mosquito larva. That means you would be affecting numerous other species by removing the mosquito.
- DigitalJack 9y agoI've heard this story before. I think it was on a documentary about the source of General Tso's Chicken (and I'm not making a joke), but I don't recall for sure... Do you have a reference?
- partycoder 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign
- indubitable 9y agoWhy not use traps or if you really want to play with nature, increase the populations of natural predators - like dragonflies. Oh right, that can't be patented. On the other hand I'm quite curious to see how this turns out! It seems like the first mosquito that is able to produce offspring that are immune to the bacterium, either through adaptation or mutation, is something that should be be rapidly selected for. Tiger mosquitoes can lay ~300 eggs so any favorable mutation should be able to rapidly propagate.
- mabbo 9y ago> Suppressing the mosquito population of an entire city is likely to require the weekly production of millions of these mosquitoes. To reach that level, Dobson’s company must find a way to efficiently separate male mosquitoes from females. The company’s technicians now separate them both by hand and mechanically, Sounds like a potential use-case for that mosquito zapping laser[0], which I've heard can target by gender. [0]https://www.fastcompany.com/3059127/what-happened-to-the-mosquito-zapping-laser-that-was-going-to-stop-malaria https://www.fastcompany.com/3059127/what-happened-to-the-mos...
- katastic 9y agoInteresting. You could probably simply "kill" the ones you don't need in a particular batch. I don't think I've ever considered "killing" the optimum strategy for sorting before.
- sschueller 9y agoSamething is done with chickens for egg production. It's barberic, the males are ground up.
- katastic 9y agoFair enough, but in that case at least the males are used for food right? Whereas the male mosquitos are literally just turned into trash.
- ftxrcc 9y agoI heavily disagree with this decision from the US gov't. It's incredibly arrogant and selfish for a species to try and modify nature for an evolutionary advantage.
- greedy_buffer 9y agoThis is happening inside cities though. I'll take some arrogance and selfishness to reduce the incidence of dengue.
- eatbitseveryday 9y agoThis is not a genetic modification of the mosquitoes, thus I don't see it as "modification of nature". We use bleach to kill bacteria, insecticides to reduce insect populations, condoms to negate the course of insemination, and breed animals and plants to have specific properties they might not otherwise acquire for our sustenance (cow, pig, chicken). Do you not consider these processes the same? If so, do you disagree with these, also? If these are not comparable, why are these different?
- toreply99887766 9y ago“Modifying nature” is the evolutionary advantage that has allowed the human species to develop. Drawing a line in the sand seems impossible given our footprint on the globe. Instead, some educated analysis of the benefits and consequences of our decisions seems like the best we can do. Do you suspect that isn’t being done here?
- lovehashbrowns 9y agoI hope you hate roads, cities, houses, domesticated animals, farming, etc.
- trophycase 9y agoThis is by far one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. We're talking systemic levels of risk...
- asasidh 9y agoever heard of the food chain ?
- quotemstr 9y agoIf I could, I would drive every human-biting mosquito to extinction. Ecosystem preservation and caution in deploying new technology is nice, but human welfare takes precedence.
- dmitriid 9y agoNot just human-biting --- start quote --- ... the arctic tundra actually has the biggest mosquito problems in the world, because the land there is a perfect incubator for mosquitoes. Mosquitoes control the migrations of woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou). Their massive herds in Canada are always on the move to find food, but in the summer they travel a lot more, covering greater distances and moving to higher ground, sometimes avoiding the best feeding sites, because they are trying to avoid the gigantic swarms of mosquitoes that plague the Arctic regions in the summer The caribou are clearly bothered by mosquitoes, losing up to a liter of blood a week during the worst outbreaks, so if asked I’m sure they’d vote for eliminating mosquitoes, and given their population size and herd mentalities they’d likely come out to vote in large numbers. --- end quote --- [1] https://www.quora.com/profile/Matan-Shelomi/Posts/Mosquitoes-Can-we-get-rid-of-them-and-what-would-happen-if-we-did https://www.quora.com/profile/Matan-Shelomi/Posts/Mosquitoes...
- 893helios 9y agoIsn't this basically how Mimic starts? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimic_(film)#Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimic_(film)#Plot)
- 4restm 9y agoI'm not sure why people are making a kerfuffle over this, entomologist have used this before to great effect. Cochliomya hominivorax, the primary screwworm fly, was eradicated from the US using very similar methods. Due to this, we do not have to worry about miasis or maggot infestations.
- nerdponx 9y agoI mentioned this in another thread, but I think part of people's problem with diseases like malaria is that they don't connect it with any kind of visceral fear. The mechanism of death is a little vague -- you get fatigued, you get a fever, and then... you die? OK, I guess. Rabies is terrifying; you devolve into madness and convulse to death. Botulism is terrifying; you become paralyzed and asphyxiate. Ebola makes you hemorrhage. Tuberculosis can literally destroy your lungs. Smallpox produces horrible painful lesions. Screwworm infestations are just kinda horrifying. So people see malaria as something bad, but not something scary. Screwworm is scary to even consider, so people jump to agree that, yes, it should be eliminated, nature be damned. Malaria is scary too, but I suspect that it doesn't engender the same physical fear response in most people. Hence the debate about mosquitoes.
- cwkoss 9y agoWould be really cool if they were able to engineer a way to make female progeny inviable while leaving males viable. Seems like that would make the system self-perpetuating.