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Trial wipes out over 80% of Australian disease-spreading mosquito

csiro.au

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Re: Trial wipes out over 80% of Australian disease-spreading mosquito

#201

Post by Eridrus »

twelvechairs wrote: post #96
denzil_correa wrote: post #5

> To address this challenge, Verily, an affiliate of Alphabet Inc, developed a mosquito rearing and sex sorting and release technology as part of its global Debug project. Verily is formerly "Google Life Sciences" and currently Alphabet Inc's research arm for life sciences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verily_Life_Sciences

If only Australia's CSIRO still had enough funding to do this kind of work itself rather than 'partner with' (i.e. contribute public funding towards the private investment goals of) for-profit companies. Amongst CSIRO's earlier inventions are 1960s insect repelent 'Aerogard', polymer banknotes and major components of Wi-Fi as we know it.

> contribute public funding towards the private investment goals

Is this actually happening, or is this just speculation?

Re: Trial wipes out over 80% of Australian disease-spreading mosquito

#202

Post by thaumasiotes »

maxerickson wrote: post #182
thaumasiotes wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horror story? The "horror story" would be "the insects are still around".

Indeed, I was being flip. It's actually been successful at eradicating populations of insects, rather rapidly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sterile_insect_techniq...

I see that "eradication" has been declared in most of those trials, but I also see that formal "eradication" is often followed by renewal of the trial, recovery of the population, or "complete eradication". I'm forced to conclude that "eradication" in this context does not have its usual meaning.

That said, it does look like this is usually a pretty successful method of ongoing population suppression.

Re: Trial wipes out over 80% of Australian disease-spreading mosquito

#203

Post by IntelMiner »

Eridrus wrote: post #201
twelvechairs wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only Australia's CSIRO still had enough funding to do this kind of work itself rather than 'partner with' (i.e. contribute public funding towards the private investment goals of) for-profit companies. Amongst CSIRO's earlier inventions are 1960s insect repelent 'Aerogard', polymer banknotes and major components of Wi-Fi as we know it.

> contribute public funding towards the private investment goals Is this actually happening, or is this just speculation?

The CSIRO has suffered enormous staff and funding cuts in recent years under the current government

Re: Trial wipes out over 80% of Australian disease-spreading mosquito

#204

Post by toomanybeersies »

soperj wrote: post #122

I never understood why the U.S didn't just do the same sort of thing with poppies in Afganistan. Would have completely wiped out the Taliban funding.

Spraying would be effective at destroying poppies in Afghanistan. There's nothing technical stopping poppies from being eradicated in Afghanistan, it's political more than anything. Opium cultivation in Afghanistan has been tolerated by the US and Afghan governments for a variety of reasons.

The USA discovered in the Vietnam War that destroying people's livelihood isn't a great way to win hearts and minds. Unfortunately half of Afghanistan's GDP comes from opium and heroin.

The Afghan government doesn't want to eradicate opium production because half of the government is involved in the opium trade.

The Russians actually wanted to spray the fields back in 2010, but the USA declined [1].

ISAF actually specifically avoided destroying poppy fields, if you watch documentaries from the Afghan War, like Restrepo or The Battle for Marjah, you'll see American troops just walking right through poppy fields and doing nothing.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-nato-russia-afghanistan/n...

Re: Trial wipes out over 80% of Australian disease-spreading mosquito

#205

Post by toomanybeersies »

soperj wrote: post #137
adventured wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a big mixed bag. If you do it that way, you just massively increased the recruitment potential for the Taliban. All of those farmers are now wiped out, have nothing to do for work, and have a new sworn enemy for life. The only possible solution that might yield positive results is aggressive replacement subsidization (extremely expensive).

They were supporting the Taliban already...

Most Afghans don't support the Taliban, or the USA, or even their own government.

Most of them just want to make a living and put food on the table without being shot by one or the other or blown up in a drone strike.

Re: Trial wipes out over 80% of Australian disease-spreading mosquito

#206

Post by ajnin »

JackCh wrote: post #189
luma wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to need a source on that. Fewer than 30 out of 3000 species of mosquito feed on humans. There is little reason for us to bother with the rest.

As I've stated throughout this threat, it isn't just about mosquitoes. Honestly I would not mourn mosquitoes if every last species was exterminated. What concerns me is the social impact of further establishing humanity as the arbitrators of which species get to live and which deserve to be exterminated. It won't stop at mosquitoes; the extermination of mosquitoes will be used to justify even more exterminations in t…

It doesn't necessarily follow that preventing death would cause an increase in population. A high mortality rate is corelated with a high fertility rate so that population grows nevertheless. In fact, it is when the mortality rate is the lowest that the spread between mortality and fertility rate is the lowest, resulting in the smallest population growth.

Re: Trial wipes out over 80% of Australian disease-spreading mosquito

#207

Post by BurningFrog »

Eridrus wrote: post #201
twelvechairs wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only Australia's CSIRO still had enough funding to do this kind of work itself rather than 'partner with' (i.e. contribute public funding towards the private investment goals of) for-profit companies. Amongst CSIRO's earlier inventions are 1960s insect repelent 'Aerogard', polymer banknotes and major components of Wi-Fi as we know it.

> contribute public funding towards the private investment goals Is this actually happening, or is this just speculation?

It does sound odd that the agency (1) doesn't have enough money to do meaningful research, but (2) can contribute more money than Alphabet can afford.

Re: Trial wipes out over 80% of Australian disease-spreading mosquito

#208

Post by jessaustin »

JackCh wrote: post #200
jessaustin wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're comparing 15 human lives against 50 sharks killed by this program? Wow. They're just sharks. The slavery boats from southeast Asia kill many more sharks every single day. The sharks they kill aren't menacing a beach. Many of the sharks they don't kill directly. They just chop off all the fins and then dump the shark back in the ocean...

Many sharks, plus bycatch, for no rational reason at all. Australian politicians vilify the animals and demand even more be killed. It's wholly irrational, as is your characterization of the sharks "menacing" the beach simply by living in their natural environment. Sharks aren't menacing the beach, the Australian government is menacing the sharks. > "They're just sharks." It is this sort of shitty attitude that will…

Sharks are fish. I personally have eaten more than 50 fish already this year.

And congratulations. You have entirely trolled me. Not even Australians are that goofy about fish.

Re: Trial wipes out over 80% of Australian disease-spreading mosquito

#209

Post by BurningFrog »

JackCh wrote: post #188
luma wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're going to weigh the social factors in wiping out the 20-something species of mosquitoes which feed on humans (out of > 3000), I think you need to factor in the possibility that malaria (and thus mosquitos) may be responsible for HALF of human deaths in our history. Half. That's an outrageous number, but Nature suggests it might be true: https://www.nature.com/news/2002/021003/full/news021001-6.ht... At what…

Half of human deaths isn't very significant considering that despite that the human population is still exploding at an unsustainable rate that will cause incredible environmental destruction if left unchecked. Far from being threatened with extinction, our present course will cause the extinction of countless other forms of life. And in response to that, you propose that we deliberately drive even more species to ex…

It's rare to see someone state so plainly that they just don't care about human life.

It makes it clear that I have no common ground for this kind of discussion with that person.

Re: Trial wipes out over 80% of Australian disease-spreading mosquito

#210

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

gascan wrote: post #94
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #73

According to the WHO ( http://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria ) * Malaria killed 445,000 people in 2016. * Of those, 285,000 were children under the age of 5. * There were 216 million cases of malaria in 2016. That is a large city's worth of children dying every year, and a large country's population having severely reduced productivity. And that is just one mosquito born illness. The guaranteed h…

The guaranteed human and economic benefits of wiping out mosquitoes, far outweigh any theoretical downside. I like how you just state that, like it doesn't even matter what the downside was. What if bird populations crashed and a pestilence set upon crops worldwide, and caused mass starvation & millions dead- kind of exactly like what happened during the Great Leap Forward? I'm not saying that would happen, but we ca…

>What if bird populations crashed and a pestilence set upon crops worldwide, and caused mass starvation & millions dead- kind of exactly like what happened during the Great Leap Forward?

Do you have any evidence at all that such a thing is likely to happen? What level of certainty that such an outcome won't happen are you aiming for? Others have noted that scientists have considered the effects of eradicating disease causing mosquitoes, and concluded that eradicating them won't to the best of our knowledge cause ecological problems. I showed evidence that around half a million people are dying every year from mosquito borne diseases. When 500,000 people are dying a year, you need more than just a vague feeling of unease not to support eradicating disease causing mosquitoes.

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