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.
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.