These threads about whether it's moral to kill mosquitoes en masse always seem to end up being about unintended consequences and ecosystem collapse. Some point

These threads about whether it's moral to kill mosquitoes en masse always seem to end up being about unintended consequences and ecosystem collapse. Some points to consider: - Those who study the strains of mosquito (a generous 50 out of ~3500) which spread disease in humans regularly state that they are not a primary food source for any one predator.[1] - Malaria killed 429 000 people in 2015, 90% of those being in Africa, and many of them children.[2] - All of our current control methods have unintended consequences. Take for example that NGOs who offered insecticide-treated mosquito nets to communities found that they were being used in waterways for fishing.[3] - In developed nations we are happily deploying much less targeted solutions without significant levels of complaint (and to counter relatively less serious mosquito-borne diseases), such as the indiscriminate aerial spraying of insecticides over large areas and waterways.[4] Everything is a trade-off, admittedly, and we can never know the full set of consequences in advance (see: the impacts of introduced species), but it might be a useful exercise to weigh your concerns against the benefits to sub-saharan Africa as a whole (and to individual African families) that could materialize were these particular strains of mosquito to be eliminated. And give a little credit to those educated people doing the research into the likelihood of ecosystem collapse and producing reasonable peer-reviewed results. Edit to add: That said, I'm personally partial to the efforts which release genetically-sterilised males. That seems less like the plot of a Hollywood doomsday movie than a spider-venom fungus. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/09/13/what-would-happen-if-we-eliminated-the-worlds-mosquitoes/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/09/13/what-would-hap... [2] https://www.who.int/features/factfiles/malaria/en/ https://www.who.int/features/factfiles/malaria/en/ [3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/31/global-use-of-mosquito-nets-for-fishing-endangering-humans-and-wildlife https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/31/global-u... [4] https://www.cdc.gov/zika/vector/aerial-spraying.html https://www.cdc.gov/zika/vector/aerial-spraying.html