9 ms·

Brazilians welcome genetically-modified mosquito to help fight dengue fever

139 points by ojosilva 13y ago

rjtavares 13y ago
Recent rabiolab episode on this subject: http://www.radiolab.org/story/kill-em-all/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/kill-em-all/
- Myztiq 13y ago
  I came here just to post that link. Cheers.
jrkelly 13y ago
One of the best new applications of GMOs. Interestingly, Rachel Carson mentioned this approach in Silent Spring: https://twitter.com/mem_somerville/status/457876443586760704/photo/1 https://twitter.com/mem_somerville/status/457876443586760704... Oxitec is making the mosquitoes via GM rather than mutation but approach is the same.
icegreentea 13y ago
A common fear when deploying systems like this is that we are somehow tampering with nature, and that given our inability to predict outcomes, we should therefore err to the side of caution. I typically agree with this line of thought. However, in this particular context, something to strongly consider is that Aedes aegypti isn't native to South America. As implied by its name, it's native to Africa. We (humans) brought them over to New World as part of the Columbia Exchange (likely in a slave ship... along with malaria, and yellow fever, and the disease in question Dengue fever).
- hrktb 13y ago
  As mosquito related problems are just plain hard and in this context ther is no other viable solution, I also think the usual fear is less important in this context. But for the sake of the argument, the fact that this mosquito comes from Africa doesn't really matter so much, as the consequences of this operation could go from making it immune to this gene, make it mutate in a different/worse direction, or have the engineered mosquitoes affect the environmenr in other unknown and not measurable ways.
  - eqdw 13y ago
    Where I'm from, the city routinely carpet-bombs the city with pesticides (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malathion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malathion). This is pretty contentious, especially since it's primarily for pest control and not actually for health reasons. GMO tech that lets us stop breathing in all that delicious malathion is a good thing, in my books
    - qeorge 13y ago
      I agree with you, and its hard for me to view carpet bombing a city with pesticides as somehow interfering less with the environment.
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    I'm not sure if it's even possible to be "immune", but if it doesn't work oh well, nothing lost. Changing the mosquitoes in any significant way is incredibly unlikely. Random mutations happen all the time in nature.
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  Aedes aegypti is a domestic animal here. And we have no lack of moskitoes to fill their niche at Brazil (the best news being that most of them didn't evolve along humans, and are harmless). It's worth looking at any biological alternative to the widespread use of insecticides.
jostmey 13y ago
The approach may work a while. But then I am sure some mutant gene will eventually emerge in the wild-type populations that will inhibit the synthetic kill gene. That's how Nature works.
- Snail_Commando 13y ago
  > The approach may work a while. But then I am sure some mutant gene will eventually emerge in the wild-type populations that will inhibit the synthetic kill gene. > That's how Nature works. More accurately, "That's how Nature works, sometimes." The statement "...some mutant gene will eventually emerge ... that will inhibit [another gene]" describes one subset of the set of all possible causes of future genetic expression branching from this point. There is no law (that we are yet aware of) that allows us to say conclusively that a certain genetic trait will be selected for or against with any meaningful certainty. Furthermore, we have no scientific footing on which to say 'we are sure that a specific mutation will arise that will inhibit this other mutation' as decreed by Nature. In order for the claim to always be true in all arbitrary subsets of Nature, we would need to at least know: whether or not the gene will be selected against, specifically how the gene will be selected against, and nearly all nth order organism-local and population-global effects of a specific mutation or selection event. (We can play Nature in the lab and make approximations of the claim, though! Sort of.) We can make statements like "If the oxygen content of that atmosphere or environment increases, it is possible that many anaerobic organisms will be selected against." Or, "If low hemoglobin production becomes advantageous, at some point after that, conditions x, y, and ... will likely exhibit reciprocal selective pressures." Of course, we can also say things like, "All species are statistically likely to go extinct." (That's not very interesting.) Essentially, we can make broad guesses about future states of genetic expression (and implied warranties and effects) under certain specific contexts. But we cannot say that a specific genetic cause and effect will occur as derived from an inherent property of Nature and a specific sub-state of the universe. As far as we know, genetics, mutation, evolution, and selection are just functions in a mostly random, iterated chaotic system that we are just beginning to comprehend. We cannot say that 'a particular gene will be selected against, because it is inevitable that specific genes are invariably inhibited or selected against by subsequent shifts in population genetics.' In a sense, that's partially accurate. All species, and by extension, each gene and all genomes, are likely to be selected against. But not always via mutation. It's about the same as saying that species go extinct because of x; it's not certain to be true and may not yield any new information. There is no law (that we know of) that allows us to make deterministic statements like 'X% of the genome will be inhibited because of the emergence of another mutation'. For all we know, a rogue asteroid might hit Earth on Tuesday during rush hour in Hong Kong. Or, that particular gene may end up surviving until the closest possible moment before the heat death of the universe. On a more fundamental level, we'd need laws that allow us to predict specific future events (with interesting and meaningful degrees of certainty). We would need to be able to identify and map the exquisitely threaded chaos woven throughout Nature before we can be reasonably certain that 'a mutation will eventually arise to inhibit this other mutation.'
argc 13y ago
I am not afraid of GM stuff, but does anyone else think this idea is potentially really dumb? What about everything that relies on these mosquitoes as a food source? I am not an expert... but trying to just kill off an entire species sounds like a TERRIBLE idea...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- greenyoda 13y ago
  And, as the article points out, killing off this one species may not even halt the spread of dengue fever: "Then there’s the possibility that as Aedes aegypti mosquitos are killed off, other species will just take their place. Phil Lounibous, an insect ecologist at the University of Florida, says getting rid of Aedes aegypti won’t necessarily solve the dengue problem. 'The so-called Asian Tiger mosquito is (also) very abundant all throughout Brazil,' Lounibous says, 'and it ... is also a vector of dengue.'"
  - gus_massa 13y ago
    I’m not sure, but perhaps eradicating the Aedes aegypti is enough to prevent most of the dengue transmission. And the Aedes albopictus (Tiger mosquito) is also a non native specie in Brazil, so it’s probably a good idea to eradicate it too, perhaps using the same method. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aedes_albopictus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aedes_albopictus
  - marcosdumay 13y ago
    It's a big and slow mosquito, seems very badly adapted to here (but somehow, it spreads at cities). Why, between several thousands of other species, do people keep pointing that this one will grow to fill the aegypti's niche?
- ggreer 13y ago
  The people behind this program aren't fools. They're experts who have given a lot of thought to this problem. Some basic points should alleviate your fears. First, the mosquito they're trying to eradicate is a non-native species. Second, said mosquito is the primary vector for Dengue fever, which infects hundreds of thousands and kills hundreds in Brazil every year. Even if this mosquito was native to South America, eradicating it would almost certainly help people. It's interesting how support for this program decreases with distance from it. If this outbreak was happening in your country, hurting your family, killing your friends, I doubt you'd be so loath to support GM solutions. A side note: 99.9% of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct. Nature is not some carefully-balanced system. It is chaos and suffering on a scale we cannot imagine. The majority of wild animals live in a state of constant hunger, pain, and disease. Those with sufficiently complex brains live in fear of predators. Speaking of predators: We would be horrified to watch a man vivisect an antelope, but we pay to watch documentaries of lions doing the same thing. Apparently animal cruelty is fine when it's done by other animals.
hoodoof 13y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toad http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toad
rdl 13y ago
I wish the GMO developers had initially focused on products which were end-user or publicly beneficial like this, vs. just raising yields or reducing pesticide use (which are end user and societally beneficial, but can be cast by opponents as economic arguments). Without the existing anti-GMO movement, GMO would have a much easier time getting adoption in cases where it's essentially unambiguously a win (like this one).
- arjunnarayan 13y ago
  "Just raising yields" has helped save millions of poor folk in third world countries from starvation. I'm not sure that pacifying first world leftist hippies should be the top PR priority of science.
  - rdl 13y ago
    Green revolution did, but that wasn't GMO. (Borlaug was probably one of the top 10 people of the 20th Century) GMO is much more recent, and generally works on crops which are large and mechanized, which don't really exist in third world countries. The main beneficiaries to date of GMO have been soybeans and corn in the US. The stat I've seen is 5-10% gains in the 90s from GMO. (http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/124/3/923.full http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/124/3/923.full) There probably are ways to use GMO which would work in non-mechanized farming, though.
    - bernawil 13y ago
      Third world countries are also mechanized. All of South America grows soybeans. It's Round Up all over. I'm from Argentina and can assure you that since early 00's soybean export taxes have paid at least one-third of the gov. budget.
      - brianbreslin 13y ago
        Argentina is running into issues with land going fallow now from too much Soy, and not enough crop rotation last I heard. Or is that not correct?
kimonos 13y ago
Brilliant idea!
PauloManrique 13y ago
Lack of education and government actions on this route is the biggest cause of dengue here in Brazil. People know they shouldn't keep water in old tyres, food plants, box of waters opened and stuff but they still do it.
brianbreslin 13y ago
A similar trial was done in the Florida Keys 2 years ago. The genetically modified mosquitos (same company I believe), were able to reduce the mosquito population immensely. Key West if they didn't carpet bomb it with insecticides from the sky would be miserable. [1]http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/11/9/genetically-modifiedmosquitoessetoffuproarinfloridakeys.html http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/11/9/genetically-...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
ekianjo 13y ago
Note that the article makes it seem that the Dengue fever is fatal in most cases, but it certainly is NOT. Most of the time people who get it will recover within 10 days, even though they will be severely incapacitated during that period. Most people who actually die from Dengue are people who were already weakened by something else or older populations.
- erkkie 13y ago
  One of the problems with dengue is that once you've been infected with one strain, getting infected with another one is much more likely to have serious consequences. That's a problem for people who travel for example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengue_fever http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengue_fever It is not entirely clear why secondary infection with a different strain of dengue virus places people at risk of dengue hemorrhagic fever and dengue shock syndrome. The most widely accepted hypothesis is that of antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). The exact mechanism behind ADE is unclear.
gcb0 13y ago
no they dont welcome it. it happens under they ignorant apathy. the region where that happens in brazil is our red neck equivalent. some politician just choose to spend a few millions on a british company (and recive the usual 10% back under the table as consultancy in the next year or so) instead of spending half of that in social programs that would have a permanent outcome instead of this joke. but since politics in those states are viewed like something magical and out of reach of the common folk, nobody cares
- windsurfer 13y ago
  Do you have any sources? I, for one, welcome our new self-destructing mosquito overlords.
  - gcb0 13y ago
    No i don't have any source because those policies are not discussed BEFORE. they are ADVERTISED AFTER the fact. which proves my point. ...but i'm sure Veja will write a piece saying how nice that solution is. Even though every single person studying it already commented that trying to kill the mosquito is idiotic.
jimworm 13y ago
I've recently been thinking about the possibility of a genetic disease for mosquitoes, transmitted down male lines but killing only females of the same brood, with the intended result that a relatively small release of males can cause an extreme imbalance in the sex ratio and possibly the elimination of mosquitoes from an area. The different mechanisms of mosquito sex determination aside, I haven't been able to work out something that might be feasible. Wondering if anybody else had similar ruminations, and if you'd share some of your thoughts?
- danieltillett 13y ago
  This has basically already been done using a bacteria called Wolbachia [0]. [0] http://www.eliminatedengue.com/our-research/wolbachia http://www.eliminatedengue.com/our-research/wolbachia
  - jimworm 13y ago
    Thanks to your cue, I found a candidate gene that might fit the bill called Medea [0]. Wolbachia itself won't cause catastrophic sex-ratio imbalances, so does not cause a "White Plague" scenario. [0] http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/bio2.0/engineering_in_the_wild_driving http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/bio2.0/engineering_in_th...
- robmcm 13y ago
  This would only work for a while, and then, "nature would find a way". Sometimes I think no one even bothered paying attention to Jurassic Park.
  - has2k1 13y ago
    Nature does not always find a way, look at the fossil record for evidence.
    - finnomenon 13y ago
      Birds are still around. Nature found a way in that specific case.
riffraff 13y ago
some time ago I read about a similar approach (used for malaria, I think) basically the GM mosquitoes have a "beak" too small for the plasmodium to get through and infect people. Once they interbreed with the anopheles the mosquitoes basically stop being transmitters of malaria. It seems slightly less likely to be something that comes back and bite us in the ass than eradicating a species from the ecosystem.
emeidi 13y ago
Unintended consequences, anyone? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences E.g. Rabbits in Australia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia#Biological_measures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia#Biological...
- danielweber 13y ago
  Simply saying "unintended consequences" means doing nothing, ever. WHO says "severe dengue is a leading cause of serious illness and death among children in some Asian and Latin American countries." After we don't have so many dead kids, some of them can grow up, and you can ask them how they feel about whatever unintended consequences there are.
  - fractallyte 13y ago
    Anthropocentrism does not answer the question...
- blisterpeanuts 13y ago
  There are always consequences, both intended and otherwise. It's best to go in with eyes open, having considered every possible consequence of our actions, and make a cost-benefit decision. When human lives are at stake, notably the millions lost to malaria, dengue, and other mosquito-borne illnesses, the unintended consequences had better be pretty massive to make a difference.
johlindenbaum 13y ago
Somethine something, Hunger Games Tracker Jacker wasps.

139 points by ojosilva 13y ago

Recent rabiolab episode on this subject: http://www.radiolab.org/story/kill-em-all/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/kill-em-all/

Myztiq 13y ago
I came here just to post that link. Cheers.

jrkelly 13y ago

One of the best new applications of GMOs. Interestingly, Rachel Carson mentioned this approach in Silent Spring: https://twitter.com/mem_somerville/status/457876443586760704/photo/1 https://twitter.com/mem_somerville/status/457876443586760704... Oxitec is making the mosquitoes via GM rather than mutation but approach is the same.

icegreentea 13y ago

A common fear when deploying systems like this is that we are somehow tampering with nature, and that given our inability to predict outcomes, we should therefore err to the side of caution. I typically agree with this line of thought. However, in this particular context, something to strongly consider is that Aedes aegypti isn't native to South America. As implied by its name, it's native to Africa. We (humans) brought them over to New World as part of the Columbia Exchange (likely in a slave ship... along with malaria, and yellow fever, and the disease in question Dengue fever).

hrktb 13y ago
As mosquito related problems are just plain hard and in this context ther is no other viable solution, I also think the usual fear is less important in this context. But for the sake of the argument, the fact that this mosquito comes from Africa doesn't really matter so much, as the consequences of this operation could go from making it immune to this gene, make it mutate in a different/worse direction, or have the engineered mosquitoes affect the environmenr in other unknown and not measurable ways.
- eqdw 13y ago
  Where I'm from, the city routinely carpet-bombs the city with pesticides (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malathion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malathion). This is pretty contentious, especially since it's primarily for pest control and not actually for health reasons. GMO tech that lets us stop breathing in all that delicious malathion is a good thing, in my books
  - qeorge 13y ago
    I agree with you, and its hard for me to view carpet bombing a city with pesticides as somehow interfering less with the environment.
- Houshalter 13y ago
  I'm not sure if it's even possible to be "immune", but if it doesn't work oh well, nothing lost. Changing the mosquitoes in any significant way is incredibly unlikely. Random mutations happen all the time in nature.
marcosdumay 13y ago
Aedes aegypti is a domestic animal here. And we have no lack of moskitoes to fill their niche at Brazil (the best news being that most of them didn't evolve along humans, and are harmless). It's worth looking at any biological alternative to the widespread use of insecticides.

jostmey 13y ago

The approach may work a while. But then I am sure some mutant gene will eventually emerge in the wild-type populations that will inhibit the synthetic kill gene. That's how Nature works.

Snail_Commando 13y ago
> The approach may work a while. But then I am sure some mutant gene will eventually emerge in the wild-type populations that will inhibit the synthetic kill gene. > That's how Nature works. More accurately, "That's how Nature works, sometimes." The statement "...some mutant gene will eventually emerge ... that will inhibit [another gene]" describes one subset of the set of all possible causes of future genetic expression branching from this point. There is no law (that we are yet aware of) that allows us to say conclusively that a certain genetic trait will be selected for or against with any meaningful certainty. Furthermore, we have no scientific footing on which to say 'we are sure that a specific mutation will arise that will inhibit this other mutation' as decreed by Nature. In order for the claim to always be true in all arbitrary subsets of Nature, we would need to at least know: whether or not the gene will be selected against, specifically how the gene will be selected against, and nearly all nth order organism-local and population-global effects of a specific mutation or selection event. (We can play Nature in the lab and make approximations of the claim, though! Sort of.) We can make statements like "If the oxygen content of that atmosphere or environment increases, it is possible that many anaerobic organisms will be selected against." Or, "If low hemoglobin production becomes advantageous, at some point after that, conditions x, y, and ... will likely exhibit reciprocal selective pressures." Of course, we can also say things like, "All species are statistically likely to go extinct." (That's not very interesting.) Essentially, we can make broad guesses about future states of genetic expression (and implied warranties and effects) under certain specific contexts. But we cannot say that a specific genetic cause and effect will occur as derived from an inherent property of Nature and a specific sub-state of the universe. As far as we know, genetics, mutation, evolution, and selection are just functions in a mostly random, iterated chaotic system that we are just beginning to comprehend. We cannot say that 'a particular gene will be selected against, because it is inevitable that specific genes are invariably inhibited or selected against by subsequent shifts in population genetics.' In a sense, that's partially accurate. All species, and by extension, each gene and all genomes, are likely to be selected against. But not always via mutation. It's about the same as saying that species go extinct because of x; it's not certain to be true and may not yield any new information. There is no law (that we know of) that allows us to make deterministic statements like 'X% of the genome will be inhibited because of the emergence of another mutation'. For all we know, a rogue asteroid might hit Earth on Tuesday during rush hour in Hong Kong. Or, that particular gene may end up surviving until the closest possible moment before the heat death of the universe. On a more fundamental level, we'd need laws that allow us to predict specific future events (with interesting and meaningful degrees of certainty). We would need to be able to identify and map the exquisitely threaded chaos woven throughout Nature before we can be reasonably certain that 'a mutation will eventually arise to inhibit this other mutation.'

argc 13y ago

I am not afraid of GM stuff, but does anyone else think this idea is potentially really dumb? What about everything that relies on these mosquitoes as a food source? I am not an expert... but trying to just kill off an entire species sounds like a TERRIBLE idea...

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
greenyoda 13y ago
And, as the article points out, killing off this one species may not even halt the spread of dengue fever: "Then there’s the possibility that as Aedes aegypti mosquitos are killed off, other species will just take their place. Phil Lounibous, an insect ecologist at the University of Florida, says getting rid of Aedes aegypti won’t necessarily solve the dengue problem. 'The so-called Asian Tiger mosquito is (also) very abundant all throughout Brazil,' Lounibous says, 'and it ... is also a vector of dengue.'"
- gus_massa 13y ago
  I’m not sure, but perhaps eradicating the Aedes aegypti is enough to prevent most of the dengue transmission. And the Aedes albopictus (Tiger mosquito) is also a non native specie in Brazil, so it’s probably a good idea to eradicate it too, perhaps using the same method. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aedes_albopictus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aedes_albopictus
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  It's a big and slow mosquito, seems very badly adapted to here (but somehow, it spreads at cities). Why, between several thousands of other species, do people keep pointing that this one will grow to fill the aegypti's niche?
ggreer 13y ago
The people behind this program aren't fools. They're experts who have given a lot of thought to this problem. Some basic points should alleviate your fears. First, the mosquito they're trying to eradicate is a non-native species. Second, said mosquito is the primary vector for Dengue fever, which infects hundreds of thousands and kills hundreds in Brazil every year. Even if this mosquito was native to South America, eradicating it would almost certainly help people. It's interesting how support for this program decreases with distance from it. If this outbreak was happening in your country, hurting your family, killing your friends, I doubt you'd be so loath to support GM solutions. A side note: 99.9% of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct. Nature is not some carefully-balanced system. It is chaos and suffering on a scale we cannot imagine. The majority of wild animals live in a state of constant hunger, pain, and disease. Those with sufficiently complex brains live in fear of predators. Speaking of predators: We would be horrified to watch a man vivisect an antelope, but we pay to watch documentaries of lions doing the same thing. Apparently animal cruelty is fine when it's done by other animals.

hoodoof 13y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toad http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toad

rdl 13y ago

I wish the GMO developers had initially focused on products which were end-user or publicly beneficial like this, vs. just raising yields or reducing pesticide use (which are end user and societally beneficial, but can be cast by opponents as economic arguments). Without the existing anti-GMO movement, GMO would have a much easier time getting adoption in cases where it's essentially unambiguously a win (like this one).

arjunnarayan 13y ago
"Just raising yields" has helped save millions of poor folk in third world countries from starvation. I'm not sure that pacifying first world leftist hippies should be the top PR priority of science.
- rdl 13y ago
  Green revolution did, but that wasn't GMO. (Borlaug was probably one of the top 10 people of the 20th Century) GMO is much more recent, and generally works on crops which are large and mechanized, which don't really exist in third world countries. The main beneficiaries to date of GMO have been soybeans and corn in the US. The stat I've seen is 5-10% gains in the 90s from GMO. (http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/124/3/923.full http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/124/3/923.full) There probably are ways to use GMO which would work in non-mechanized farming, though.
  - bernawil 13y ago
    Third world countries are also mechanized. All of South America grows soybeans. It's Round Up all over. I'm from Argentina and can assure you that since early 00's soybean export taxes have paid at least one-third of the gov. budget.
    - brianbreslin 13y ago
      Argentina is running into issues with land going fallow now from too much Soy, and not enough crop rotation last I heard. Or is that not correct?

kimonos 13y ago

Brilliant idea!

PauloManrique 13y ago

Lack of education and government actions on this route is the biggest cause of dengue here in Brazil. People know they shouldn't keep water in old tyres, food plants, box of waters opened and stuff but they still do it.

brianbreslin 13y ago

A similar trial was done in the Florida Keys 2 years ago. The genetically modified mosquitos (same company I believe), were able to reduce the mosquito population immensely. Key West if they didn't carpet bomb it with insecticides from the sky would be miserable. [1]http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/11/9/genetically-modifiedmosquitoessetoffuproarinfloridakeys.html http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/11/9/genetically-...

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

ekianjo 13y ago

Note that the article makes it seem that the Dengue fever is fatal in most cases, but it certainly is NOT. Most of the time people who get it will recover within 10 days, even though they will be severely incapacitated during that period. Most people who actually die from Dengue are people who were already weakened by something else or older populations.

erkkie 13y ago
One of the problems with dengue is that once you've been infected with one strain, getting infected with another one is much more likely to have serious consequences. That's a problem for people who travel for example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengue_fever http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengue_fever It is not entirely clear why secondary infection with a different strain of dengue virus places people at risk of dengue hemorrhagic fever and dengue shock syndrome. The most widely accepted hypothesis is that of antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). The exact mechanism behind ADE is unclear.

gcb0 13y ago

no they dont welcome it. it happens under they ignorant apathy. the region where that happens in brazil is our red neck equivalent. some politician just choose to spend a few millions on a british company (and recive the usual 10% back under the table as consultancy in the next year or so) instead of spending half of that in social programs that would have a permanent outcome instead of this joke. but since politics in those states are viewed like something magical and out of reach of the common folk, nobody cares

windsurfer 13y ago
Do you have any sources? I, for one, welcome our new self-destructing mosquito overlords.
- gcb0 13y ago
  No i don't have any source because those policies are not discussed BEFORE. they are ADVERTISED AFTER the fact. which proves my point. ...but i'm sure Veja will write a piece saying how nice that solution is. Even though every single person studying it already commented that trying to kill the mosquito is idiotic.

jimworm 13y ago

I've recently been thinking about the possibility of a genetic disease for mosquitoes, transmitted down male lines but killing only females of the same brood, with the intended result that a relatively small release of males can cause an extreme imbalance in the sex ratio and possibly the elimination of mosquitoes from an area. The different mechanisms of mosquito sex determination aside, I haven't been able to work out something that might be feasible. Wondering if anybody else had similar ruminations, and if you'd share some of your thoughts?

danieltillett 13y ago
This has basically already been done using a bacteria called Wolbachia [0]. [0] http://www.eliminatedengue.com/our-research/wolbachia http://www.eliminatedengue.com/our-research/wolbachia
- jimworm 13y ago
  Thanks to your cue, I found a candidate gene that might fit the bill called Medea [0]. Wolbachia itself won't cause catastrophic sex-ratio imbalances, so does not cause a "White Plague" scenario. [0] http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/bio2.0/engineering_in_the_wild_driving http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/bio2.0/engineering_in_th...
robmcm 13y ago
This would only work for a while, and then, "nature would find a way". Sometimes I think no one even bothered paying attention to Jurassic Park.
- has2k1 13y ago
  Nature does not always find a way, look at the fossil record for evidence.
  - finnomenon 13y ago
    Birds are still around. Nature found a way in that specific case.

riffraff 13y ago

some time ago I read about a similar approach (used for malaria, I think) basically the GM mosquitoes have a "beak" too small for the plasmodium to get through and infect people. Once they interbreed with the anopheles the mosquitoes basically stop being transmitters of malaria. It seems slightly less likely to be something that comes back and bite us in the ass than eradicating a species from the ecosystem.

emeidi 13y ago

Unintended consequences, anyone? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences E.g. Rabbits in Australia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia#Biological_measures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia#Biological...

danielweber 13y ago
Simply saying "unintended consequences" means doing nothing, ever. WHO says "severe dengue is a leading cause of serious illness and death among children in some Asian and Latin American countries." After we don't have so many dead kids, some of them can grow up, and you can ask them how they feel about whatever unintended consequences there are.
- fractallyte 13y ago
  Anthropocentrism does not answer the question...
blisterpeanuts 13y ago
There are always consequences, both intended and otherwise. It's best to go in with eyes open, having considered every possible consequence of our actions, and make a cost-benefit decision. When human lives are at stake, notably the millions lost to malaria, dengue, and other mosquito-borne illnesses, the unintended consequences had better be pretty massive to make a difference.

johlindenbaum 13y ago

Somethine something, Hunger Games Tracker Jacker wasps.