Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US government approves 'killer' mosquitoes to fight disease

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 107 posts

Re: US government approves 'killer' mosquitoes to fight disease

#31

Post by sametmax »

freeflight wrote: post #11
joering2 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Solutions breed new problems

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!

Re: US government approves 'killer' mosquitoes to fight disease

#32

Post by _nothing »

anonacct37 wrote: post #22
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eliminating mosquitoes would not cause major ecological issues. So when you have millions of people dying every yea…

How many planets do we have? By my count it's one. What's our track record on changing ecosystems to fix problems without creating worse problems? Zero out of how many? I hate mosquito too, and they are probably useless, but no good engineer makes changes without a backup and a tested rollback strategy, where's our backup?

It's a bit different in that this isn't a permanent change. This won't wipe out mosquitos everywhere just yet. The infected males will mate with females, and their eggs will be nonviable.

Then the males will die, and wild males and females will continue to mate and produce viable offspring unless the process is repeated. There's plenty of room for finding errors and fixing them --up until all mosquitos are eradicated.

Re: US government approves 'killer' mosquitoes to fight disease

#33

Post by strictnein »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #20

This is kind of like neutering/spaying feral cats, and returning them to where they were found. They stop breeding, but continue to compete with others for resources.

A mosquito's life is pretty short, on the order of a couple of weeks.

Re: US government approves 'killer' mosquitoes to fight disease

#34

Post by indubitable »

Why not use traps or if you really want to play with nature, increase the populations of natural predators - like dragonflies. Oh right, that can't be patented. On the other hand I'm quite curious to see how this turns out! It seems like the first mosquito that is able to produce offspring that are immune to the bacterium, either through adaptation or mutation, is something that should be be rapidly selected for. Tiger mosquitoes can lay ~300 eggs so any favorable mutation should be able to rapidly propagate.

Re: US government approves 'killer' mosquitoes to fight disease

#35

Post by josiahtu »

badminton1 wrote: post #28

Mao started a campaign to kill all sparrows because they eat the "grain of the people". Well, right after that, insects started proliferating, so then they had to exterminate all of them. Among the insects killed, pollinators died. So that region now looks completely Marsformed and now all agriculture required pollination by hand . Killing a species can start a slippery slope.

Sure but not all species play an equally critical role in the ecology.

Re: US government approves 'killer' mosquitoes to fight disease

#36

Post by maxander »

nvahalik wrote: post #2

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?

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.

Re: US government approves 'killer' mosquitoes to fight disease

#37

Post by alex_young »

sametmax wrote: post #23
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eliminating mosquitoes would not cause major ecological issues. So when you have millions of people dying every yea…

Eliminating an insect that has been here for millions of years, part of the food chain, helping thousands of micro-organism to mix DNA and be exposed to various conditions, thus helping evolution... That won't cause a major issue ? Sure ? 100% Safe ? You swear ? No backies in case of totally destroying our environment like we always do ? We are such an arrogant specie.

This technology can't eliminate mosquitoes. It's literally just birth control. Some mosquitoes still mate with otherwise normal males and continue to produce offspring.

Re: US government approves 'killer' mosquitoes to fight disease

#38

Post by pault »

sametmax wrote: post #23
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eliminating mosquitoes would not cause major ecological issues. So when you have millions of people dying every yea…

Eliminating an insect that has been here for millions of years, part of the food chain, helping thousands of micro-organism to mix DNA and be exposed to various conditions, thus helping evolution... That won't cause a major issue ? Sure ? 100% Safe ? You swear ? No backies in case of totally destroying our environment like we always do ? We are such an arrogant specie.

I've had dengue and zika, and I don't care how arrogant it is, I'm all for extincting those fuckers.

Re: US government approves 'killer' mosquitoes to fight disease

#39

Post by mabbo »

> Suppressing the mosquito population of an entire city is likely to require the weekly production of millions of these mosquitoes. To reach that level, Dobson’s company must find a way to efficiently separate male mosquitoes from females. The company’s technicians now separate them both by hand and mechanically,

Sounds like a potential use-case for that mosquito zapping laser[0], which I've heard can target by gender.

[0]https://www.fastcompany.com/3059127/what-happened-to-the-mos...

Re: US government approves 'killer' mosquitoes to fight disease

#40

Post by saulrh »

nvahalik wrote: post #2

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?

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?

Post reply on HN