6 ms·

This 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 a

This 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 ago
We 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 ago
  Solutions breed new problems
  - sametmax 9y ago
    Yeah, 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 ago
Right 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 ago
  It'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 ago
    2 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 ago
http://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 ago
  I'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 ago
    The 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 ago
      Note that honeybees are livestock. Their presence in the US is itself an example of manipulating the environment to our own ends.
  - theptip 9y ago
    The 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 ago
I 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 ago
Something 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 ago
  It'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 ago
    I 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.

joering2 9y ago

We 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 ago
Solutions breed new problems
- sametmax 9y ago
  Yeah, 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 ago

Right 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 ago
It'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 ago
  2 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 ago

http://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 ago
I'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 ago
  The 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 ago
    Note that honeybees are livestock. Their presence in the US is itself an example of manipulating the environment to our own ends.
- theptip 9y ago
  The 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 ago

I 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 ago

Something 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 ago
It'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 ago
  I 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.