
Eradicating Earth’s Mosquitoes to Fight Disease Is Probably a Bad Idea - digital_ins
http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/why-eradicating-earths-mosquitoes-to-fight-disease-is-probably-a-bad-idea?utm_source=mbtwitter
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ghshephard
Almost no support for the thesis of "bad things will happen if we wipe out
mosquitoes" other than "We don't know what will happen."

On the flip side, we _do_ know what will happen if the Aedes aegypti,
Anopheles, etc... is allowed to continue to exist - 100s of thousands of
people a _year_ will die.

I wonder how the author would feel about keeping mosquitoes around "just in
case", if hundreds of thousands of her neighbors were dying every year.

And guess what, if, for some very, very bizarre reason it turns out that Aedes
aegypti/Anopheles was a super important species, there is zero difficulty in
breeding and releasing billions of them back into the wild in very short
order.

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ascorbic
The author might as well say that we should keep polio around, just in case.
Just because mosquitoes are macroscopic they have this perverse fear of
unintended consequences.

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ascerbic
I think you mean ascerbic lol.

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taneq
Species go extinct all the time, and the world doesn't end. Wiping out one
species deliberately will probably not be a disaster. Letting mosquitoes
continue to exist is just as likely to "bring along with it an endless string
of unforeseen consequences, one that could possibly be worse for humans than
the problems we have now" as not doing so.

On the other hand, we should probably do some due diligence before deciding to
embark on a mosquitocide, just to try and swing the odds in our favour.

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soft_dev_person
I think the "how" is more important. Genetic modification sounds awesome, and
really dangerous. If it's not just right, or if the potential of unforeseen
mutations occurring is above zero, I think we risk too much regardless of the
benefits.

I.e. please be completely certain that the GM offspring mating with female
individuals will not result in some other side effect...

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ghshephard
Other than movies, do we have any evidence that "GM offspring" (whatever that
means, turns out defining "GM" is not as straightforward as one might
suspect), are, in any way more likely to be dangerous than plain, vanilla,
two-mosquitoes having babies offspring?

Because, here's the thing - we do know the implications of letting these
mosquitoes live. 100s of thousands of people a year die. Every Year.

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soft_dev_person
Do we have any evidence that it won't?

If you believe the Monsanto GM corn documentaries, releasing GM into the wild
may have bad effects (intended or otherwise) outside the designated
population. Plants are obviously not the same as insects, but I would prefer
to err on the safe(r) side.

Edit: Also, a known bad is often better than an unknown.

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ghshephard
The known bad is hundreds of thousands of people dying _every year_. It's
pretty hard to conceive of how a _laboratory tested_ solution which
kills/slows down mosquitoes could be any worse than that, particularly when
all sorts of genetic modifications are occurring _by the billions_ in nature
every single day without _any testing /verification_.

You know what would turn around everyone's attitude in about 7 days flat
(probably fewer) - have those hundreds of thousands of people dying a year be
white, rich, Americans. Every conceivable solution to wipe out the mosquitos
would be developed, and rolled out with _zero_ debate (and I mean zero - there
wouldn't be a single naysayer of any merit)

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dnautics
the article keeps conflating the idea of eradicating human-disease-causing
mosquitoes with eradicating _all_ mosquitoes. Presumably the strategy of
genetically sterilizing male mosquitoes, for example, would only work for
_aegypti_. The article itself says, "there are thousands of different mosquito
species found across the planet, and relatively few of them impact human
health"

So eradicating human-threat mosquitoes may not have such a large effect on the
global mosquito ecosystem.

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crusso
On HN several times (that I've observed), this issue has come up and the
starting point of the discussion acknowledges the fact that "mosquito" is not
just a single species. And we're mostly all just lay people on the subject who
can use google.

It's disappointing to see an ostensibly researched article not even approach
our remedial level. I wonder why anyone would upvote it.

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rubidium
use the Flag button on article's like this. If you see articles getting
upvotes, and you read the article and think "this is a crappy, poorly written
article and a waste of all of our time", Flag it.

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crusso
I didn't think that I should use flag as a simple downvote.

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rubidium
From the guidelines: "If you think a story is spam or off-topic, flag it by
clicking on its "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma
threshold.)"

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're
evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters,
or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-
topic."

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jlward4th
TL; DR: We actually have no idea what impact there is to having or eradicating
mosquitos. So let's do nothing.

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hendekagon
to which the answer is, more research to discover what mosquitos connect with
and are any of the connections beneficial

mosquitos inhabit a niche which could be filled by another organism were they
to be eradicated and then we're back to square-one in a new way

but yeh let's eradicate them

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digital_ins
I think that irrespective of the title and the benefits of conservation of the
ecosystem, letting mosquitoes stay alive needs a far more compelling argument
than "it might take away some other animal's snack"

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snarfy
I'm not convinced disease is inherently bad for a species. Sure it's bad for
the poor individual that catches it, but who knows what the total net sum
gain/loss is. For all we know the net result could be a higher rate of
extinctions as species end up with overall weaker immune systems.

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crusso
While there is some truth in that, the thought that we should allow natural
culling processes to continue to thrive so that the rest of the surviving
genetic population can improve the species goes against many core principles
built into our society.

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soft_dev_person
The core principle built into our society is that a lot of people on earth
must suffer and die so that the lucky few can live the prosperous lives we do.
Just saying.

Admitting it is maybe not so popular.

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crusso
That's extremely cynical and unwarranted.

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soft_dev_person
Cynical, no doubt. But unwarranted?

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pvaldes
> On the other, a feature in Nature in 2010 found that there were no species
> who relied solely on mosquitoes

Sorry, Nature, but I can name several species that could not live without
mosquitoes, and you should be able to do the same also. This would be like
banning the milk for babies because humans don't depend solely on milk and can
eat many other things.

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Cpoll
I can't name any. I'm stuck on the image of a cartoon frog hitting a mosquito
with its tongue.

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TooSmugToFail
Discussion on whether eradicating an entire species would be good or bad
assumes we actually can eradicate an entire species. How easy it is to do
that? I mean, can we be so sure this is possible?

