3 ms·

This changes everything. 400k people a year is a penny change, I'm sure we can safely ignore them.

• littlestymaar 7y ago
  It's not about the number in itself, it's about the causes: Gene drive enthusiasts say: “this is a dramatic issue which need extreme bio-engineering to solve it because we have no other solutions”. Whereas in reality, it's a concerning health issue (but much less concerning at a global scale than cigarettes or mere junk food) that's almost fixed worldwide with conventional means (health infrastructures, local mosquitoes elimination, bug nets, and there's even a pilot program for a vaccine with promising results) and would have been solved if Africa wasn't in such a poor shape in term of development. For the record, the whole western Europe is infested with Anopheles Atroparvus[1] which is a vector for malaria (and have been a source of many malaria epidemics in Europe in the past) yet there is no more malaria there nowadays, and in some places with high levels of water pollution it has even been considered an endangered specie and is slowly recovering. [1]: https://ecdc.europa.eu/en/disease-vectors/facts/mosquito-factsheets/anopheles-atroparvus https://ecdc.europa.eu/en/disease-vectors/facts/mosquito-fac...
  • wetpaws 7y ago
    Less dead people is better then more dead people regardless of how you would look at this.
    • alluro2 7y ago
      For the sake of argument - what about more alive people, but with more dead animals / species and with failing ecosystems if something would not go quite as foreseen with crispr method? That question is becoming more and more important as humanity has such larger potential of affecting the rest of nature - how much more valuable is human life over everything else on the planet...