
US government approves 'killer' mosquitoes to fight disease - hourislate
https://www.nature.com/news/us-government-approves-killer-mosquitoes-to-fight-disease-1.22959
======
nvahalik
This sounds like one of those headlines that shows up before one of those
movies like 28-days later.

I'm all for trying to fight disease but how deeply do we actually understand
what we're trying to solve. How do we know that we actually aren't going to
make things worse down the road?

~~~
RcouF1uZ4gsC
[http://www.who.int/whr/1996/media_centre/executive_summary1/...](http://www.who.int/whr/1996/media_centre/executive_summary1/en/index9.html)

Mosquitoes are responsible for _millions_ of deaths every year, and hundreds
of millions of infections often with severe disability. We understand stuff
pretty deeply now. According to
[https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html](https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html)
eliminating mosquitoes would not cause major ecological issues.

So when you have millions of people dying every year from a cause on one hand
and only vaguely specified fears of some nebulous future harm, the reasonable
and ethical thing to do is to do what you can to eliminate mosquitoes.

~~~
anonacct37
How many planets do we have? By my count it's one.

What's our track record on changing ecosystems to fix problems without
creating worse problems? Zero out of how many?

I hate mosquito too, and they are probably useless, but no good engineer makes
changes without a backup and a tested rollback strategy, where's our backup?

~~~
dsjoerg
Not zero. Here are some changes we've made that affected the living things
around us, but they were worth the risk 1 Indoor plumbing 2 elimination of
wolves and other predators around us 3 elimination of lice and rats from our
bodies and homes 4 vaccination

~~~
24gttghh
Eliminating wolves contributed to higher deer populations and an increase in
the number of deer ticks that spread Lyme disease to humans. Intensive
forestry operations also help to increase deer populations as they like the
more open spaces that result from clear-cuts.

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andrei_says_
I am just wondering, are we about to discover what other insects etc. are
being influenced by this decision, possibly with negative effects on a large
scale?

Makes me think of the four pests campaign.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign)

~~~
Chardok
Except this proposal is widely accepted in the scientific community with
hundreds of ecological studies behind it, where as the Four Pests was just
speculation by a guy who likely never studied any modern biology.

~~~
andrei_says_
Yes, that’s definitely a huge differentiation.

What i was using this example for, however, was the unpredictability of
influencing an infinitely interconnected and complex system. In the case of
the four pests, the influence was crude and especially myopic, so it makes for
a wonderful example.

It is rare that the influence ends where we imagine it would. There are many
possibilities for race conditions which i know i can’t even imagine.

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4restm
I'm not sure why people are making a kerfuffle over this, entomologist have
used this before to great effect. Cochliomya hominivorax, the primary
screwworm fly, was eradicated from the US using very similar methods. Due to
this, we do not have to worry about miasis or maggot infestations.

~~~
nerdponx
I mentioned this in another thread, but I think part of people's problem with
diseases like malaria is that they don't connect it with any kind of visceral
fear. The mechanism of death is a little vague -- you get fatigued, you get a
fever, and then... you die? OK, I guess.

Rabies is terrifying; you devolve into madness and convulse to death. Botulism
is terrifying; you become paralyzed and asphyxiate. Ebola makes you
hemorrhage. Tuberculosis can literally destroy your lungs. Smallpox produces
horrible painful lesions. Screwworm infestations are just kinda horrifying.

So people see malaria as something bad, but not something _scary_. Screwworm
is scary to even consider, so people jump to agree that, yes, it should be
eliminated, nature be damned. Malaria is scary too, but I suspect that it
doesn't engender the same physical fear response in most people. Hence the
debate about mosquitoes.

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dmoy
This sounds like the wolbachia release of aedes egyptai mosquitoes that verily
or w/e did in socal earlier in the year. Not so frightening, since it's just a
sterilization technique using existing bacteria.

~~~
QuercusMax
You are correct. MosquitoMate (mentioned in TFA) is working with Verily's
Debug: [https://blog.verily.com/2017/07/debug-fresno-our-first-us-
fi...](https://blog.verily.com/2017/07/debug-fresno-our-first-us-field-
study.html).

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mabbo
> Suppressing the mosquito population of an entire city is likely to require
> the weekly production of millions of these mosquitoes. To reach that level,
> Dobson’s company must find a way to efficiently separate male mosquitoes
> from females. The company’s technicians now separate them both by hand and
> mechanically,

Sounds like a potential use-case for that mosquito zapping laser[0], which
I've heard can target by gender.

[0][https://www.fastcompany.com/3059127/what-happened-to-the-
mos...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3059127/what-happened-to-the-mosquito-
zapping-laser-that-was-going-to-stop-malaria)

~~~
katastic
Interesting. You could probably simply "kill" the ones you don't need in a
particular batch.

I don't think I've ever considered "killing" the optimum strategy for sorting
before.

~~~
sschueller
Samething is done with chickens for egg production. It's barberic, the males
are ground up.

~~~
katastic
Fair enough, but in that case at least the males are used for food right?
Whereas the male mosquitos are literally just turned into trash.

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dec0dedab0de
This is kind of like neutering/spaying feral cats, and returning them to where
they were found. They stop breeding, but continue to compete with others for
resources.

~~~
eatbitseveryday
> This is kind of like neutering/spaying feral cats, and returning them to
> where they were found. They stop breeding, but continue to compete with
> others for resources.

What resources are mosquitoes competing for in the environment?

~~~
dec0dedab0de
Mating partners...

It's obviously not a one to one with cats, just a similar technique of
population control via sterilization and release.

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partycoder
Mao started a campaign to kill all sparrows because they eat the "grain of the
people".

Well, right after that, insects started proliferating, so then they had to
exterminate all of them.

Among the insects killed, pollinators died. So that region now looks
completely Marsformed and now all agriculture required pollination _by hand_.

Killing a species can start a slippery slope.

~~~
DigitalJack
I've heard this story before. I think it was on a documentary about the source
of General Tso's Chicken (and I'm not making a joke), but I don't recall for
sure... Do you have a reference?

~~~
partycoder
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign)

------
893helios
Isn't this basically how Mimic starts?
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimic_(film)#Plot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimic_\(film\)#Plot))

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quotemstr
If I could, I would drive every human-biting mosquito to extinction. Ecosystem
preservation and caution in deploying new technology is nice, but human
welfare takes precedence.

~~~
dmitriid
Not just human-biting

\--- start quote ---

... the arctic tundra actually has the biggest mosquito problems in the world,
because the land there is a perfect incubator for mosquitoes.

Mosquitoes control the migrations of woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus
caribou). Their massive herds in Canada are always on the move to find food,
but in the summer they travel a lot more, covering greater distances and
moving to higher ground, sometimes avoiding the best feeding sites, because
they are trying to avoid the gigantic swarms of mosquitoes that plague the
Arctic regions in the summer

The caribou are clearly bothered by mosquitoes, losing up to a liter of blood
a week during the worst outbreaks, so if asked I’m sure they’d vote for
eliminating mosquitoes, and given their population size and herd mentalities
they’d likely come out to vote in large numbers.

\--- end quote ---

[1] [https://www.quora.com/profile/Matan-
Shelomi/Posts/Mosquitoes...](https://www.quora.com/profile/Matan-
Shelomi/Posts/Mosquitoes-Can-we-get-rid-of-them-and-what-would-happen-if-we-
did)

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cwkoss
Would be really cool if they were able to engineer a way to make female
progeny inviable while leaving males viable. Seems like that would make the
system self-perpetuating.

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ftxrcc
I heavily disagree with this decision from the US gov't. It's incredibly
arrogant and selfish for a species to try and modify nature for an
evolutionary advantage.

~~~
eatbitseveryday
This is not a genetic modification of the mosquitoes, thus I don't see it as
"modification of nature".

We use bleach to kill bacteria, insecticides to reduce insect populations,
condoms to negate the course of insemination, and breed animals and plants to
have specific properties they might not otherwise acquire for our sustenance
(cow, pig, chicken). Do you not consider these processes the same? If so, do
you disagree with these, also? If these are not comparable, why are these
different?

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trophycase
This is by far one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. We're talking
systemic levels of risk...

~~~
asasidh
ever heard of the food chain ?

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indubitable
Why not use traps or if you really want to play with nature, increase the
populations of natural predators - like dragonflies. Oh right, that can't be
patented. On the other hand I'm quite curious to see how this turns out! It
seems like the first mosquito that is able to produce offspring that are
immune to the bacterium, either through adaptation or mutation, is something
that should be be rapidly selected for. Tiger mosquitoes can lay ~300 eggs so
any favorable mutation should be able to rapidly propagate.

