
TED Talks: lasers killing mosquitoes by the hundreds - nir
http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/14/ted-talks-mischief-lasers-killing-mosquitoes-by-the-hundreds/
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stratomorph
This is some pretty sweet technology, I've always wanted the ability to reach
out and touch an insect without having to chase it with a flyswatter. That
said...

This is a technological stop-gap to a bigger problem. Malaria will continue to
be a problem as long as we fail to develop an effective vaccine for it.
Treatments are terrific for those of us in the developed world, but will
always be impractically faraway or too expensive for those hit hardest. The
disease has adapted quite well to us as long-lived carriers; only a vaccine
can kill it for good.

I can't find the source I wanted, but I recall reading about post-WWII efforts
to eradicate malaria on a worldwide scale with DDT, touched on at
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddt#DDT_use_against_malaria>. The people
involved were racing against the clock to eradicate Anopheles, because the
longer they took, the more resistant the mosquitoes became, the more likely
the funding was to dry up, and the more objections cropped up about the
wholesale destruction of swampy wetlands involved. The project could only
succeed if we could maintain the will to destroy on a massive scale, and
because we half-assed it, we're worse off: land was drained and nature
massively disrupted, and the disease wasn't wiped out completely and the
mosquitoes are more tolerant to DDT now.

Zapping a few mosquitoes, or even a few billion, will only put a little more
selection pressure on the skeeters and the parasite. I continue to hold out
hope for a universally effective vaccine.

~~~
TheSOB88
At least the DDT-tolerant mosquitoes will deter people from using DDT again.
Hopefully.

