I got https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/4vhqoc/should_we_wipe_mosquitoes_off_the_face_of_the/ to the front page of Reddit, which probably got somewhere on the order of magnitude of 50,000 people to read it or at least think about the idea, which can only help in terms of moving it into the Overton Window.
I know at one point it was number 6 for logged out users.
I just submitted it and was lucky. It's the kind of thing that sub likes. I've had around three posts hit the front page out of probably thousands since I started, there's definitely a large luck factor that goes in.
We're consequentialists here, so I get all the credit for it even if it wasn't much effort, right?
Agreed! What would be the best approach (I'm a PhD student and vector-borne disease epidemiologist)?
I don't think that gene drives are the best technology when you account for the politics and indeed the post by Luke that you link doesn't use the term. SIT seems to be effective enough from a cost-benefit analysis and can be used in a very controlled way.
I look a while ago into the issue and wrote an LW post about it. I think there's a fair chance that pushing for gene drives mosquitos to be released will mean that mosquito elemintion will happen later rather than sooner.
Oxitec has today the technology that produes "sterile mosquitio" sterile fo...
Should we worry that if Trump supports eradicating mosquitoes, that will cause Trump opponents to oppose it?
Nature news
"Gene drives thwarted by emergence of resistant organisms"
"The Target Malaria team has developed a second generation of gene-drive mosquitoes, hoping to slow the development of resistance, says Andrea Crisanti, a molecular parasitologist at Imperial College London. The researchers plan to test them in their new Italian facility later this year to get a sense of how the mosquitoes might fare in the wild. But molecular biologist Tony Nolan, also at Imperial, expects evolution to throw up some surprises. He says that his greatest wor...
more mosquito links, this is about weaponizing humans blood to poison mosquitoes.! weaponizing humans in new and ethically challenging ways.
Mosquitoes fatally attracted to deadly, sweet-smelling potion
http://www.sciencecodex.com/mosquitoes-fatally-attracted-deadly-sweet-smelling-potion-461555
"Ultimately, they used a semiochemical blend in a matrix containing sugars and proteins to mimic 20 common chemical signals that attract mosquitoes to nectar-producing flowers and induce them to feed. Combining these compounds with insecticides such as pyrethroids or spinosad led to highly effective formulations. "
"In preliminary results, they found that mosquito populations plunged by two-t...
Bacteria could be key to freeing South Pacific of mosquitoes
Islands in the region could be rid of the biting insects within a decade.
http://www.nature.com/news/bacteria-could-be-key-to-freeing-south-pacific-of-mosquitoes-1.22392
"He and his team plan to do this using a technique that infects mosquitoes with a specific strain of a bacterium called Wolbachia. About 65% of insects around the world carry Wolbachia, but the strains vary. If mosquitoes with different strains mate, the resulting eggs develop incorrectly and don’t hatch. If there are enough of...
A mosquito trap that uses a person’s smell combined with warm water and a dark cylindrical shape could transform how the insects are caught in developing countries, say its creators."
http://www.scidev.net/global/disease/news/breakthrough-mosquito-trap.html#
Coetzee says to get protection throughout the night, the light would need to be switched on every two hours, which would disrupt human sleeping patterns as well as mosquito biting behaviour.
http://www.scidev.net/global/malaria/news/night-light-quells-mosquito-bites.html
a mosquito specific fungus that expresses scorpion toxins.
Improved efficacy of an arthropod toxin expressing fungus against insecticide-resistant malaria-vector mosquitoes
http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-03399-0
"We previously demonstrated that fungal pathogens can provide an effective delivery system for mosquitocidal or malariacidal biomolecules. Here we compared genes from arthropod predators encoding insect specific sodium, potassium and calcium channel blockers"
"In conclusion, fungi can be genetically modified to strategically m...
Cationic amino acid transporters play key roles in the survival and transmission of apicomplexan parasites.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28205520?dopt=Abstract#
Association between Toxoplasma gondii seropositivity and memory function in nondemented older adults.
report an experimental molecule that inhibits kidney function in mosquitoes and thus might provide a new way to control the deadliest animal on Earth.
"What our compounds do is stop urine production, so they swell up and can't volume regulate, and in some cases they just pop," he said.
"By targeting blood feeding female mosquitoes, we predict that there will be less selective pressure for the emergence of resistant mutations," Denton said.
The investigators show VU041 to be effective when applied topically, which indicates that it potentia...
Visual guide to hacked mosquitoes
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/a-visual-guide-to-modified-mosquitoes/
and they say at end of article that large scale tests in urban areas of brazil next year
The lab where they intentionally infect people with malaria to run "challenge" studies.
http://www.businessinsider.com/malaria-challenge-trials-research-seattle-gates-2016-11\
I didn't know there was even a group out there taking the discussion to it's limits, Interesting read.
"What principle(s) should govern our stewardship of the rest of the living world? How many of the traditional horrors of "Nature, red in tooth and claw" should we promote and perpetuate? Alternatively, insofar we want to preserve traditional forms of Darwinian life, should we aim for an ethic of compassionate stewardship instead. Cognitively, nonhuman animals are akin to small children. They need caring for as such."
Is it a good idea to leave alive mosquitos that don't bite humans? How long would it take them to mutate and fill the "human bloodsucking" niche that is suddenly vacant?
Perhaps a more comprehensive program of disease vector eradication is in order. Any organism that acts as a flying hypodermic needle poses the risk of moving pathogens around between species. For that matter, there are a lot of parasites in the world that parasitise mammals. If they were all to be eradicated, predators could take up the slack, but predators such as foxes, wolves ...
Note that with a goal to eliminate a species completely, the longer you wait to get experience and perfected technology, the better.
A major screw up in such a case would be some random factor, mutation etc. preventing us from wiping all mosquitoes, and leaving a group that would be resistant to current gene-drive technology.
I don't know enough about gene-drives to suggest how it might happen - but the point is that there are always "unknown unknowns".
That smaller group would then quickly spread and replace the previous population, and would be ha...
This is probably a good idea. My take is that most of resistance I'm culturally aware of would come from people concerned about an irreversible change to the ecosystem, whether or not this concern is warranted. Potentially worth investigating/getting some experts on your side/proposing a contained preservation of a mosquito population (the way we preserve rare diseases)
If it is possible to drive mosquitoes to extinction, it is a good idea, but it sounds difficult to me. It would be easier to to use gene drive to spread antimalarial drugs. This sounds complicated, but people have done it in the lab. By aligning the gene drive with the fitness of the mosquitoes, it is more likely to work. It does not preclude future extermination. But this is a complicated mechanism, not easily adaptable to, say, Zika.
Not that it's relevant, but the claim that malaria has killed half of humans who have lived is completely absurd. Falciparum malaria is nasty because it has only recently jumped to humans. With time, it would adapt to be less deadly, to better spread, and humans would adapt to be less vulnerable. This is exactly what happened to vivax ("benign") malaria. Vivax jumped to humans 35k years ago, while falciparum only 5k years ago. The genus Homo was free of malaria for millions of years. If you define humans as starting 50k years ago, then some form of malaria was present for most of that time, although how deadly it was varied a lot over the millennia.
Most prediction markets give Hillary Clinton an advantage over Donald Trump. In general, if one candidate comes out in favor of something, the supporters of the other candidate will be more likely to oppose that thing (all else equal). Doesn't this suggest attempting to get Clinton to come out in favor of eradicating mosquitos is the better strategy?
Malaria infections up in the US, mostly due to travel
"The study showed that malaria hospitalizations were more common in the U.S. than hospitalizations for many other travel-associated diseases. For example, during the same period, dengue fever, which is common in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and throughout Latin America, and has caused small, local outbreaks in south Florida and Texas, generated, on average, 259 hospitalizations a year compared with 1,489 for malaria.
According to the study, malaria hospitalizations are quite common in the U.S., and the assoc...
Artemisia annua dried leaf tablets treated malaria resistant to ACT and i.v. artesunate
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0944711317300570
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-04/wpi-pwd042417.php
" After five days of treatment with tablets made from only the dried and powered leaves of Artemisia , all 18 patients fully recovered. Laboratory tests showed they had no parasites remaining in their blood. (Weathers noted more than 100 other drug-resistant patients also have been successfully treated with DLA tablets.)
Natural Selection Is About to Be Overpowered by the First-Ever Mammalian Gene Drive"
"If the new gene drives prove effective and New Zealand’s plan moves forward, this marks the first use of the technology to wipe out entire local populations of an animal species"
"A workaround is the Trojan female approach, spearheaded by Dr. Daniel Tompkins at the Landcare Research organization based in New Zealand. The technology wo...
“In 2015, there were roughly 214 million malaria cases and an estimated 438 000 malaria deaths.” While we don’t know how many humans malaria has killed, an estimate of half of everyone who has ever died isn’t absurd. Because few people in rich countries get malaria, pharmaceutical companies put relatively few resources into combating it.
The best way to eliminate malaria is probably to use gene drives to completely eradicate the species of mosquitoes that bite humans, but until recently rich countries haven’t been motivated to such xenocide. The Zika virus, which is in mosquitoes in the United States, provides effective altruists with an opportunity to advocate for exterminating all species of mosquitoes that spread disease to humans because the horrifying and disgusting pictures of babies with Zika might make the American public receptive to our arguments. A leading short-term goal of effective altruists, I propose, should be advocating for mosquito eradication in the short window before rich people get acclimated to pictures of Zika babies.
Personally, I have (unsuccessfully) pitched articles on mosquito eradication to two magazines and (with a bit more success) emailed someone who knows someone who knows someone in the Trump campaign to attempt to get the candidate to come out in favor of mosquito eradication. What have you done? Given the enormous harm mosquitoes inflict on mankind, doing just a little (such as writing a blog post) could have a high expected payoff.