Mosquito release programs like this are now several decades old and have shown high efficacy with few environmental side effects where they have been tried. It is certainly more environmentally friendly than DDT. Meanwhile, the benefits are enormous and if done successfully in Africa could be directly measured in terms of human suffering.
> On July 1, 1946 the Communicable Disease Center (CDC) opened its doors and occupied one floor of a small building in Atlanta. Its primary mission was simple yet highly challenging: prevent malaria from spreading across the nation. Armed with a budget of only $10 million and fewer than 400 employees, the agency’s early challenges included obtaining enough trucks, sprayers, and shovels necessary to wage war on mosquitoes.
They are _now_ the centre for disease control and prevention
What do you mean?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-05/the-3-gun...
What was the CDC's original mission?
Did it execute it competently?
Why is it now involved in areas other than communicable diseases?
Do people in organizations seek to increase their power and influence?
Do they do this by enlarging the scope of their organizations' missions?
How is this notionally science-based entity being influenced by other factors?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24293489 - my sibling comment to yours might clarify my opinion for you...
I actually suspect this role was thrust on the CDC because they are generally supported by everyone (everyone sane anyway). I'm not a fan of this having happened because they should be too important to get mixed into politically poisonous debates.
Still well within the realm of health and certainly affects communicable diseases (an unhealthy population is more prone to worse effects of disease).
That said, it'd kind of inevitable that they run a course like that because constantly doing good non-controversial work banks political capital and the politicians are gonna try to harness organizations like that for their own ends.
How, exactly, are folks (who are not versed in medicine) supposed to get this information from a trusted source?
Successful eradication in Florida and Italy was based on aggressive source control (stagnant water), control of re-importation, and use of insecticides (including DDT) for outbreak control.
Airborne spraying of more targeted larvicides continues to be used in Florida and other places.
Malaria rates in rural areas of Africa are much higher than urban areas so urbanisation also plays a role.
It was used in Africa, at least in 2016.
http://chm.pops.int/Implementation/DDT/DDTMeetings/DDTEG6201...
> Why don’t we use DDT today?
You mean for agriculture? Because using DDT for disease vector control was never internationally banned (only banned at the national level).
It's banned in agriculture because it kills stuff other than the mosquitoes. In particular, its use is restricted by the "Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants". Persistent Organic Pollutants are pretty much as bad as they sound, and DDT is one.
http://www.rachelcarson.org/SilentSpring.aspx
Despite the environmental damage of DDT the Africans wanted to wipe out malaria first but were not able to purchase it in the quantities needed.
As late as 2004 leading newspapers editorialized that eradicating malaria in Africa outweighed the environmental damage
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/magazine/what-the-world-n...
> Carson has been targeted by some organizations opposed to the environmental movement, including Roger Bate of the pro-DDT advocacy group Africa Fighting Malaria and the libertarian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute; these sources oppose restrictions on DDT, attribute large numbers of deaths to such restrictions, and argue that Carson was responsible for them. These arguments have been dismissed as "outrageous" by former WHO scientist Socrates Litsios. May Berenbaum, University of Illinois entomologist, says, "to blame environmentalists who oppose DDT for more deaths than Hitler is worse than irresponsible." Investigative journalist Adam Sarvana and others characterize this notion as a "myth" promoted principally by Roger Bate of the pro-DDT advocacy group Africa Fighting Malaria (AFM).
This doesn't make sense. Eradicating malaria in Africa is beneficial to the human species. Environmental damage applies to all other species. I don't understand how one could "outweigh" the other. They are just two different objectives.
We’re not (yet) beings of pure thought who can exist independent of our environment, so the damage to the environment does have to be counted before we decide if something is net-positive.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gtcXXbuR244
> DDT was less effective in tropical regions due to the continuous life cycle of mosquitoes and poor infrastructure. It was not applied at all in sub-Saharan Africa due to these perceived difficulties.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#Use_in_the_1940s_and_195...
See "DDT":
I'm reluctant to be playing god on this front, especially in light of the fact that it seems like the insect population is not doing well, globally, and forms the base for a complex food chain.
For decades we have been performing a semi-eradication effort for mosquitoes for decades, and we have not noticed a substantial change that can be considered a result of that.
I understand hesitation to muck with nature, but I think it's sort of a privileged position to have when you live in an area where malaria and West Nile are not a serious risk. Malaria kills a lot of Africans every year (400,000+ [0]), and I'm not sure how much hesitation I'd have towards eradication if anyone in my family died from it.
For me the equation is tilted pro-GMO because I see the alternative of letting nature run its course as a 100% certainty that a current tragedy continues to unfold.
So I'll continue to support GMO experiments like this. I just might have my fingers crossed, in case our D20 roll is bad and the kill gene jumps into the Zika virus and then into humans...
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) or lateral gene transfer (LGT) is the movement of genetic material between unicellular and/or multicellular organisms other than by the ("vertical") transmission of DNA from parent to offspring (reproduction). HGT is an important factor in the evolution of many organisms
A similar story that I found absolutely amazing is the story of the screwworm and its eradication from the US. Not the whole world, mind you (which feels foolish long term).
I am not trying to make a point. This discussion made me think of it and I wanted to share.
See the "appeal to nature fallacy" [1]
"Life finds a way"