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Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)

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Re: Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)

#161

Post by tempestn »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #151
jacobr1 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure. Plenty of people swim in waters where sharks are regularly observed. And still the attacks are low. And further, with many attacks, I think in particular great-whites, they back off after the first bite, which allows for much greater survivability. So the ratio of "shark contact" to "sharks win" is probably low. And if you also add in fishing for sharks (such as for fins) humans probably kill a lot more…

Hm. Not convinced. Contact with sharks vs contact with mosquitoes, or with dogs, or anything else on that list? Most people spend maybe hours a year in shark ecosystem. Vs 365 days a year in dog country, or mosquito etc.

Certainly the amount of contact plays a roll. That's why dogs are so much higher than wolves for instance. But it's also true that most of the time people spend swimming around sharks, they don't get bitten. How the ratio of attacks to contacts compares between sharks and dogs or other animals I don't know; agreed that would be somewhat interesting!

Re: Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)

#162

Post by hobs »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #9
hobs wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Malarone is also a malaria preventative, and I personally had a psychotic break while taking it, it took 8 men to hold me down and strap me a bed for two days until I came to. Seems pretty harmless I guess?

If you don't mind, could you say a bit more about the psychotic break? The closest thing from my own experience is being told that I thrashed around a lot while coming out of post-surgery anesthesia, but I have no memory of it.

I remember having a sundowner, talking with my family and slowly getting more and more irritated about some minor conversational bit someone said.

I clearly remember starting to get louder and more aggressive and then I blacked out. I woke up in a pool of my own sweat several days later wondering what had happened.

People talked to me about what happened I piece together bits and pieces floating around in a red haze and having a human pile on top of me.

In retrospect the weirdest part was how readily they accepted I was sane again.

Re: Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)

#163

Post by mac01021 »

dheera wrote: post #74
mac01021 wrote: post #27

Just as a curiosity, humans kill hundreds of trillions of insects annually. [1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-insects-die-from-people-stepp...

Insects, however, reproduce so much that without population control, the ecosystem would be in imbalance very quickly, and they can't be educated to have less children. Insects were "designed" into the system such that a large number of them are expected to die. I wouldn't be surprised if birds and spiders kill far more insects than people.

They probably do if you count only humans directly squashing the insects with their hands/feet/cars.

If you count things like pollution, pesticides, land use, they absolutely don't.

Insect populations have been reduced to a fraction of their former size over the last few decades due to human activity.

Re: Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)

#164

Post by Gibbon1 »

yyyk wrote: post #87
ahelwer wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nature doesn't care about how something looks politically. Those decisions were bad and aren't vindicated because nothing went wrong (there are other cases where things went very very wrong, as another commenter mentions with DDT). In a nonlinear world you can never know whether you were right or just lucky.

Make no mistake, the West would do DDT all over again if that was the price for getting rid of Malaria. But a very targeted intervention is off limits due to 'well, we don't know, something might go wrong'. Nature doesn't care if humans all die. Nature doesn't 'care' at all. Humanity does. And this looks very ugly and very hypocritical.

The US stamped out malaria in the 1930's as a public works program. That was before DDT.

Re: Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)

#165

Post by [deleted] »

cryptoquick wrote: post #138
7leafer wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So am I, my friend.

Your pushback against the HN downvoter cowards, especially when you've questioned the status quo and planted a seed of dissent against the grain, is quite appreciated by this particular HN user. Honestly, I find the dialogue here toxic and coarse, and I'm sure I'm a part of that, too. Ideally I'd just delete my account, and never come back... But HN won't allow me to delete my account, so, in spite, I'll keep coming…

[deleted]

Re: Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)

#166

Post by tempestn »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #121

So, Covid is on track to beat this, sadly.

Yes, but mosquitos kill that many every single year. Look at the reaction to COVID-19 compared to the amount of effort going into eliminating mosquito-borne disease. There's certainly some, but it's far from the mobilization we see when a calamity on this scale hits rich countries.

Re: Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)

#167

Post by divbzero »

DaniFong wrote: post #93
ravenstine wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it most mosquitoes, or is it primarily aedis aegypti? I could swear I read that particular species was responsible for most mosquito-bourne disease, but I can't seem to find much information for the proportion between it and other species. If they disproportionally kill even more than other mosquitoes, that also puts things into greater perspective. Perhaps if we could target this particular species, it would save…

i know someone who wants to do this, and probably can.

Is that “someone” funded by the Gates Foundation? [1] [2]

[1]: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Mosquito-Week-2018

[2]: https://www.geekwire.com/2018/gates-foundation-teams-oxitec-...

Re: Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)

#168

Post by tempestn »

clairity wrote: post #66
thawaway1837 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umm, for one thing because going into lockdown wouldn’t do anything to prevent death by mosquito? You do know that mosquitoes have wings and can move from place to place without humans right?

you know that the most effective preventative for mosquito bites are mosquito nets, like staying inside, with screens on your windows and doors, right?

And people who live in areas where malaria is common do use nets and screens as much as possible. Unlike many people in western countries though, they don't have the luxury of locking themselves down indefinitely. Nor do they have the same expectation that the measures would only need to be temporary.

Re: Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)

#169

Post by yyyk »

throwanem wrote: post #149
jacobr1 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one plan we do have that targets a specific species is the spread of neutered males. We've done this successfully in the past with screw-worm.

The sterile-insect technique does work, but it's not going to achieve the kind of eradication people in here are talking about. Wild-eyed ideas about mass pesticide application and CRISPR gene drives are more the sort of thing that actually concern me, or would if I thought anyone talking about them was anywhere near the required levers of power to actually make them happen. As it is, I just wish people had enough se…

Strile-insect achieves 90-95% (e.g.[1]). Sustained and combined with a bit from the other approaches (netting, drying some swamps, this article suggests a medicine to make infected biting mosquitoes die, etc.), we can at least repeat what happened in much of the West - the population was reduced so much the parasite went extinct, when the population bounced back it was 'clean' (in other places in the West these mosquito simply went extinct).

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4489809/

Re: Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)

#170

Post by quicklime »

cameronfraser wrote: post #36
Koshkin wrote: post #18

To put this in a perspective, 1 Mosquito 1,000,000 2 Human 475,000 3 Snake 50,000 4 Dog 25,000 5 Tsetse Fly 10,000 6 Assassin Bug 10,000 7 Freshwater Snail 10,000 8 Ascaris Roundworm 2,500 9 Tapeworm 2,000 10 Crocodile 1,000 11 Hippopotamus 500 12 Elephant 100 13 Lion 100 14 Wolf 10 15 Shark 10 https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-animals-that-kill-mo...

Poor sharks, they get one of the worst raps for how little damage they do to humans. I'm surprised to see dogs so high up on that list.

https://xkcd.com/795/
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