Dengue rates plunged after release of lab-altered mosquitoes

I find these sort of things somewhat odd. Dengue is extremely unpleasant, but as the article mentions it has a 99.98% survival rate in spite of being predominantly spread in some of the most impoverished areas in the world. Wiki [1] gives even better figures than the article which yield a 99.99% survival rate, and a total hospitalization rate of 0.13%.

Unforeseen consequences are a thing, and nature can evolve in difficult to predict ways. For instance one of the big early arguments for GMO crops is that it'd enable us to reduce our overall usage of herbicides. The main modification was glyphosate resistance, and since glyphosate was otherwise highly toxic to all plants, it was thought that just a bit of it would be enough to take care of what used to require much more herbicide.

And it lived up to this promise at first. But nature responded by naturally evolving glyphosate resistant weeds, and farmers responded by just spraying more of it, and more regularly, and we're now using more herbicide/acre than ever before. In 1991 (just prior to GMO crops starting to really kick off), we were using a rate of 1.18 units of herbicide per acre. By 2000 that had declined to 1.06. "Now" (2014) we're up to 2.02 and rapidly increasing. [2]

So many things (related to interacting with nature in various forms) seem to be being done under the assumption of a stationary target, when nature is anything but.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengue_fever

[2] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5044953/

I believe conditions like this cause impact to people's livelihood by putting them out of action.

Caring for the sick also has economic costs.

> yes, that includes even the armchair criticism from cynical misanthropes who consider human deaths resulting from this species a good thing

If ever there was a species under no threat whatsoever it's those guys. I'm all for eradicate and move on, nature will be bound to throw something else at humanity so go for the small wins and to heck with it.

This is great news. Dengue was a constant problem in my home country of Malaysia, and remains a problem to this day. I still remember all the public education campaigns about it that I saw when I was young (random ads on TV about making sure there's no stagnant water, seeking medical help if you notice , etc), I'm very glad that there are easily implementable solutions to these problems.

As a side note, I wonder why this kind of research is not more popular in university labs of tropical countries. Malaysia, Singapore, India, etc are home to plenty of university labs that should have the expertise and motivation to do this kind of thing, but they're really dropping the ball if they're not working on it right now. Every time I read about new mosquito fighting innovations it's out of an American or European lab, far away from where it's most impactful.

Is it a problem of funding? Somehow the Malaysian government funds less mosquito disease research than the US? Political will? I would hope that the health ministries of tropical countries are willing to throw some money at the problem. Institutional knowledge? Plenty of the professors are educated in Australia/UK/US, so that can't be it. Coverage? Western media covers western labs, and don't notice when labs elsewhere do the same thing?

It's the means. If people wanted to look for ways to help reduce stagnant water, as a means of reducing mosquito populations, I suspect exactly 0 people would object. But releasing billions of mosquitos with a bacteria and hoping there's no natural evolution to it, and everything continues to work as planned indefinitely...? There's more than sufficient reason for skepticism there.

Beyond this, I would also consider the arrogance of the present. When you look back at stupid decisions made in times past, it's not like they just blindly rushed into them (well not always at least). They certainly assessed them using the latest knowledge available at the time, and then moved forward after it was deemed safe and effective. It just turns out that we're quite frequently wrong on such assessments, and so things that fail in 'obvious' ways only look obvious with the benefit of hindsight. It's like how NASA can lose a half a billion dollar probe in modern times because nobody bothered to ensure that all systems were using the same unit systems. [1]

Take yourself a decade in the future and imagine reading about these mosquitoes gaining, at the minimum, a resistance to the bacteria being used. Would it really surprise you? Or would you be thinking something more along the lines of, 'Wow, how could they not see that coming?'

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter