Only a tiny fraction of the world’s mosquito species prey on humans. All of these are invasive across essentially their entire range, having tagged along with humans as we moved around the world. Multiple careful studies say that eliminating these species would have little or no impact on the environment. However, it would save at least a million human lives a year, and get rid of a constant source of discomfort that prevents people from safely spending as much time outside as they would prefer. Malaria is only one of dozens of diseases, many potentially fatal, spread by mosquitoes. Gene drives can safely and relatively inexpensively eliminate these parasitic insects; we can create male mosquitoes that can only have male offspring and which then crash the population. It’s well past time that we did it.
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That is why gene drive is better. It allows for a much more permanent fix.
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We're experimenting in FL with breeding and releasing effectively sterilized mosquitos that prevent further breeding. Not sure where we are with that intervention but it has been studied. We get rare cases of weird tropical mosquito borne diseases like Eastern Equine
Releasing sterile males suppresses the population, but it needs to be done constantly. If you really want to get rid of the problem, and don’t want to have to spend a huge amount of money on an ongoing basis, gene drive is the best technology we have.
Malaria was eliminated from the Southern USA where it was endemic by coordinated public health campaigns; the claim that releasing genetically modified mosquitos would work is highly questionable. Just build the same kind of public health infrastructure everywhere.
The coordinated public health campaign you speak of was spraying DDT. As for gene drive, of course it would work. We have direct evidence from experiments that even releasing sterilized male mosquitoes dramatically crashes the population. We also successfully exterminated the
I don’t know, it seems that every time some one species of life is removed (or the attempt is made), it creates another one of those “imbalances” in Nature’s ecosystem and another instance of what-a-mole.
I mean, why do mosquitoes exist on the planet? Do they serve as food
So tell me what happened after we exterminated the screw fly worm from North America? What was the negative from that? So far as I can tell, there was none at all. What has been the downside of exterminating the guinea worm? So far as I can tell, there was no downside. What was
There are lasers that can selectively zap mosquitoes, why not be cautious and use the laser system around an entire region and see how it goes first.
Because that’s utterly impractical, you can’t physically do it, and the mosquito species that prey on humans are all invasive to begin with, and previous exterminations of parasites like the screwfly worm had only positive effects.
The populations will evolve resistance to the gene drives, so it's not a one and done release. Presumably the gene drives could also spread globally and into non human biting populations through cross breeding.
Neither of those is really relevant. Crossbreeding is not possible between reproductively distinct species. That is like claiming that if we genetically modify house cats that we have to worry that jungle ocelots might be affected. As for resistance to gene drives, a gene drive
We can go further. I am explicitly pro tick, flea, chigger, and mosquito genocide. They're just another bug, whatever eats them will find a similar sized bug to eat. Nature will adapt. We can end them all. Total eradication is the only acceptable outcome.
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💯. Most mosquitoe species aren't disease bearing and we have no beef with them.
Did someone get bitten by a mosquito today? 🧐 (But, seriously, kill them all)
I live in an area that used to have lots of mosquitoes and now have almost none because of successful human intervention.
You can just kill the mosquitoes 🦟 🤷♂️
Just hold some in vaults so you can reintroduce them if something starts to go horribly wrong.
