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Re:List of Epidemics by Consultant32452 on Sunday January 26, 2020 @02:19AM (#22150926)
There's over 3000 species of mosquitoes. Only 3 of those species are the primary carriers of these diseases. Only 1 species carries malaria. So we only gotta get rid of a small portion of mosquitoes.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/invertebrates/gro...

Re:List of Epidemics by kikoreis on Sunday January 26, 2020 @03:18AM (#22151091)
I know there is some science backing the general approach, but doesn't evolution tend to pressure the virus developing different vectors, when faced with eradication? There is probably a good subset of the 2997 other species that could serve the purpose.
Re:List of Epidemics by lotsofpulp on Sunday January 26, 2020 @05:20AM (#22151388)
> but doesn't evolution tend to pressure the virus developing different vectors, when faced with eradication?

What does evolution “pressuring” mean? Either the organism (or virus) has sufficient chances to randomly mutate a a trait that enables it to survive, or it goes extinct.

Re:List of Epidemics by kikoreis on Sunday January 26, 2020 @08:09AM (#22151899)
Well, I meant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_pressure

Think of a population as holding at any given time a number of individuals carrying mutations. The fringe mutations, such as being able to be hosted by a different type of mosquito (say, better survivability in the host) don't provide much of a benefit to survival. But if the default host population goes away, those mutations become super valuable and will be selected.

See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/transgenic-mosqui... for a discussion on this topic.

Re:List of Epidemics by xorfish on Sunday January 26, 2020 @04:30AM (#22151256)
Probably depends on how fast the species is eradicated.