Mosquitoes Genetically Modified to Crash Species That Spreads Malaria

Re:Mosquitoes Genetically Modified to Crash Species That Spr... by godson_drafty on Monday September 24, 2018 @05:32PM (#18061637)

What about releasing a genetically altered strain of the malaria organism itself?

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Re:Mosquitoes Genetically Modified to Crash Species That Spr... by maxerickson on Monday September 24, 2018 @05:37PM (#18061679)

Crashing the mosquito population greatly diminishes transmission of the disease.

Because malaria mostly infects humans, if you managed to create a malaria that conferred immunity, you'd have to infect lots and lots of people with it to spread it into the wild, and then it would only infect a subset of the people with the normal malaria strain.

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Re:Mosquitoes Genetically Modified to Crash Species That Spr... by hsnewman on Monday September 24, 2018 @05:36PM (#18061669)

Maleria reproduces asexually, so I guess it wouldn't work.

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Re:Mosquitoes Genetically Modified to Crash Species That Spr... by danieltillett on Monday September 24, 2018 @05:41PM (#18061708)

Malaria reproduces both sexually and asexually depending on its lifecycle stage.

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Re:Mosquitoes Genetically Modified to Crash Species That Spr... by gascan on Monday September 24, 2018 @07:04PM (#18062241)

Immune mosquitoes would be good too, though certainly more challenging to engineer than "kill everything".

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