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Engineered Mosquitoes Could Wipe Out Dengue Fever
Posted by
Soulskill
on Thu Jan 24, 2008 09:02 PM
from the working-out-the-bugs dept.
from the working-out-the-bugs dept.
Christina Valencia points us to a Wired story about scientists who plan to use genetically modified mosquitoes to reduce the population of Dengue-carrying insects. The altered genes cause newly born mosquitoes to die before they are able to breed if they are not supplied with a crucial antibiotic. This is a more aggressive approach than the anti-Malaria work we discussed last year. From Wired:
"Mosquitoes pass dengue fever to up to 100 million people each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Up to 5 million die. If the scientists can replicate their results in real field conditions, their technology could kill half of the next generation of dengue mosquitoes, which scientists say would significantly reduce the spread of the disease. If all goes well the company envisions releasing the insects in Malaysia on a large scale in three years."
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GM Mosquito Could Fight Malaria 281 comments
qw0ntum writes "The BBC is reporting that a genetically modified (GM) variety of mosquitoes could be effective in combating the spread of malaria to humans. These GM insects carry a gene that prevents them from being infected by the malaria parasite and has the added benefit of providing a fitness advantage to the mosquitoes. From the article: 'In the laboratory, equal numbers of genetically modified and ordinary wild-type mosquitoes were allowed to feed on malaria-infected mice. As they reproduced, more of the GM, or transgenic, mosquitoes survived. According to the researchers, whose results appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, after nine generations, 70% of the insects belonged to the malaria-resistant strain. [...] The modified mosquitoes had a higher survival rate and laid more eggs.' This has major implications for the billions of people living in areas with endemic malaria. The question in my mind, though, is what effects on the ecosystems of these areas will replacing an organism low on the food chain with a GM version? Between the news we saw last week and biomagnification, could this wind up substituting one problem for another?"
Submission: Engineered Mosquitoes Could Wipe Out Dengue Fever by Anonymous Coward
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Didn't we learn (Score:4, Funny)
A specific protein in the movies vs an anti-biotic in real life!
I guess I welcome our genetically engineered super mosquito overlords!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Until we get anti-anti-biotic-resistant (or whatever you'd call them) skeeters ...
We could also go the other route - reduce the affected population of humans by half ...
Seriously, it won't work unless its done every year - a real cash cow.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, there's an easy solution for that. Genetically engineer them to make them go extinct [nytimes.com].
This article on Slashdot is proposing something a *lot* more tame than the specicide proposal. Basically, most genes have a 50% chance of passing on to offspring, but certain "selfish" genes game the system and all but guarantee that they're passed along. So, you make a selfish, lethal, recessive gene -- that is, a mosquito can have one copy and survive just fine.
Re:Didn't we learn (Score:5, Funny)
Skinner: Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
Parent
Hmm.... (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Probably because you just saw "I Am Legend".
Ripple Effect (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ripple Effect (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, and take a walk out in a tropical region sometime. You'll quickly realize that the notion of the eco-chain being in any significant peril because one species of insect disappears is a bit far-fetched, I think. The number of insects (both in general number as well as the number of species) is pretty staggering. Species have disappeared all throughout history, and nature is fabulous at filling available niches.
I'd have no hesitation in pulling the trigger if it mean eliminating every damn mosquito on earth. Sorry if that sounds unenlightened.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not unenlightened, it's stupid. It displays a staggering ignorance of the effect of introducing foreign species in a new environment (Northern Pike, rabbits, zebra mussel, spanish moss, etc. etc. etc.) or of removing one species from an ecosystem (grizzly bear, star fish, kelp, etc, etc, etc). Finally, you completely overestimate the redundancy and resilience of the trop
Re:Ripple Effect (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, I'm well aware of the dangers of introducing species to new areas or making changes of any sort of an ecosystem. I just happen to think that saving so many human lives is worth the risk in this case. I'm sorry you don't feel the same way.
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Re:Ripple Effect (Score:5, Insightful)
Fortunately, public health decisions aren't made by one guy calling themself "Dutch Gun" who wants to just walk around pulling triggers because of their single personal benefit.
Instead, people with that kind of power typically don't make decisions with at the neural level that slaps at a sting. Instead we think of the actual costs of human intervention, and how that's different from the more integrated processes in nature eliminating species, and learning from when it's the same, and causes a ripple effect that we'd rather not be injured by.
Biology is perhaps the most complex studyable natural system. Ecosystems are the most complex interactions of biological systems. We have to consider what an apparently "simple", drastic action that destroys an entire species that other species depend on will actually do, before we do it.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In New Orleans, we eliminated centuries of Yellow Fever by draining the swamps, not by targeting a species with untested genetic engineering weapons.
Call me crazy, but that sounds more devastating to the environment than the proposals we're discussing. I wish I could find a link, but I seem to recall how scientists are just now discovering that draining the swamps has a more serious impact than they figured (although I can't remember the specifics).
Fortunately, public health decisions aren't made by one guy calling themself "Dutch Gun" who wants to just walk around pulling triggers because of their single personal benefit.
And thank God for that. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want that responsibility, which is why I presented it in what I thought was a purely hypothetical context as a way to indicate my support of the scientis
But... what's the long term impact of this? (Score:5, Insightful)
If these things don't breed... then they start dying off? Then what happens when the mosquito population severly reduced, will other insects take their place, or will the ones naturally immune to this grow bigger etc...
Although, a world without mosquitos would be nice
Re:But... what's the long term impact of this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Crucial antibiotic... (Score:5, Funny)
Whatcouldpossiblygowrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually it was European humans. From this story, it looks like they're about to strike again.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Interestingly though, I've read in several places now the theory that human agriculture may have been developed in direct response to our destruction of the animal herds that hunter-gatherer culture depended on. Civilization, such
Are mosquitos important? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Are mosquitos important? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bottom line is that Mosquito larvae are extremely beneficial to ecosystems (as food). Read this [alaska.edu] for a quick overview. Contains the quote:If you want to read something a little more specific to the south, try this Mosquito Virtues article. [nps.gov]
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Re:Are mosquitos important? (Score:5, Interesting)
Back when my wife and I had just bought our house I installed two small ponds. Within days we were being bitten alive by mosquitoes. You could see the larvae swimming around in the ponds. We went down to the local creek and returned with a couple of dozen small fish. Within two days we had our result. Hardly any mozzies and fish twice the size.
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Re:Are mosquitos important? (Score:5, Informative)
There are many species of mosquitos, not all (or even most IIRC) of which bite humans. There's no need - and no way - to wipe out all mosquitos. Hammering the specific species that transmit deadly diseases to humans is an ecological engineering project and moral choice that I think most humans are comfortable with, though.
The effort in the article specifically attacks one species - the Aedes aegypti mosquito.
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Won't Work (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Won't Work (Score:5, Interesting)
This is not exactly a new concept, although the implementation is quite different. Cattle screw worm (which was a serious economic pest) has been eliminated from North and South America from an aggressive irradiation program in which larvae are reared in large numbers, and then irradiated with cobalt-60. Insert your own "huge, radioactive flies" joke here, but the net upshot is that the irradiated flies mated with irradiated flies and failed to produce fertile offspring for whatever reason. Fewer fertile offspring is a good thing when it comes to population control of undesirable cattle parasites.
Similar programs with Mediterranean fruit flies have been used to control or eradicate populations, but there were some issues a few years back with making sure they really were sterilized by the procedure.
So, it's nothing *that* new, and variations on the technique have proven useful in the past. Now instead of green, glow-in-the-dark flies, we'll just have mutant, GMO'd mosquitoes. Life goes on- hopefully without dengue. Maybe someday without malaria.
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flying needles (Score:4, Interesting)
The Eco-Nut replies are telling (Score:4, Interesting)
I guess it's to be expected from the "Silent Spring" crowd, who refuse to acknowledge that the REAL effect of banning DDT has been millions of deaths from malaria [junkscience.com], against a hypothetical doomsday scenario. Sound familiar?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It won't do people very good if, because we wipe out one creature, another creature dies out, and then another, and so on. It's called a food-chain, and an eco-system for this very reason.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Eco-Nut replies are telling (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck with "the ecosystem" and you risk secondary and tertiary effects that may produce dramatic changes for people too.
Did you see that news article today about how partisan people are all about the emotional reaction rather than rational? Your use of term "Eco-Nut" and your simplistic framing of the discussion all point to a partisan opinion on your part.
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Re:The Eco-Nut replies are telling (Score:4, Insightful)
http://www.pan-uk.org/pestnews/actives/ddt.htm [pan-uk.org]
What we now use are mostly Organophosphate based pesticides (which are probably just as bad, but 'luckily' the metabolites are much harder to trace, so you can't get sued if your products poison an entire generation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organophosphorous [wikipedia.org]
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Eco-Nut replies are telling (Score:4, Informative)
As serious as the illness was, there was never any risk of me dying: my family is well enough off that I received good medical care. But for every guy like me with the resources to get by in the event of catastrophic illness, there are about a thousand who die, coughing and bleeding, in the gutters. I really wish people in the west would think about these people before they dismiss potential solutions to epidemics for "environmental" reasons.
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dengue (Score:3, Informative)
A friend of a friend of mine got dengue in Indonesia. I was there after he had gotten over it, but from second-hand accounts it didn't sound like much fun. I think he had a mild form, where he ran a horrendous fever for about a week, and then had a full-body painful rash for about a week, and then had some serious depression for a few months until he figured out that you can take pills to counteract the neurological aftereffects (which I hear tend to last about a year). I'm not sure if he had to be hooke
Re:The Eco-Nut replies are telling (Score:5, Insightful)
How about the Permian-Triassic mass extinction [wikipedia.org], which killed 96% of all marine species and a little over 70% of land species? How about the Cryogenian glaciation, also known as Snowball Earth [wikipedia.org], when glaciers reached the equator? How about the Carboniferous [pnas.org], when the oxygen concentration was so high that wet grass could burn? Hell, compared to the last ice age [wikipedia.org], the last ten thousand years have been wickedly hot and weird.
There is no balance in nature. There was no Garden of Eaden before we ate from the tree of science and sinned with industrialization. There was no paradise, only variable, capricious nature. The environment is valuable, but remember that we should protect it for our sake, so that we have a place to live, not because a trout or a tree is morally superior to man.
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Re: (Score:3)
Birds are the primary predator for most insects (and fish feed on mosquito larvae), and insect populations recover from DDT sprayings much more quickly than birds or fish. And since they can now breed with impunity, as they don't have to worry about predators anymore, those insects will be a much bigger threat to the human population than they were before, and just spraying more DDT doesn
Mistake in subject.... (Score:3, Funny)
There... fixed that for ya. Now queue overlord-welcoming comments....
Charles Darwin Thinks... (Score:3, Informative)
Charles Darwin thinks that this idea is probably dumb.
Unless they manage to release some critical number of mosquitoes, the faulty ones will die and the normal ones will pass on their undamaged genes.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
*cough*killerbees (Score:3, Insightful)
Wipe it out completely? Possibly. (Score:3, Informative)
They are preventing the female mosquitoes from mating with the "normal" males, and at the same time (via mutant offspring) increasing competition for resources needed by "normal" offspring. This _should_ cause a reduction in the dengue fever mosquito (aedes aegypti) population. The question is, given there will always be a small percentage of normal males who will mate with the females, can they eradicate dengue 100% at least within a given isolated area?
I think so yes.
What they want is to release their mutants so they outnumber the normals by a MASSIVE ratio -this is key. Since their offspring die, this will ultimately reduce the number of female aedes aegypti mosquitoes. The actual percentage of dengue carrying mosquitoes (had to have gotten unlucky and bitten an infected person) is a sub fraction of the dengue carry capable mosquitoes. In turn, there will be a quick dramatic decline in infected people because the chance of a normal aedes aegypti mosquito actually biting a dengue infected person and then giving it to a normal person will become lower and lower.
However I think the public will oppose this for a few reasons:
1. Irrational paranoia about the G word (genetically modified), thousands of genetically modified mosquitoes (even if they are non biting males) being released OMG.
2. The reduction in aedes aegypti females may cause an increase in other mosquito species that compete with it (increase in anopheles (malaria)?).
3. Male mutant mosquitoes will have to be introduced in large numbers to the environment until either aedes aegypti or dengue fever is 100% eradicated (but mad profits if you own the company selling them).
4. Public may get pissed off at the sight of mosquitoes getting released in their neighborhood.
Probably they need to combine this with introducing a harmless (non disease vector) mosquito species suited to a given environment (for example some places may suit aedes albopictus).
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Dengue is a mosquito disease as well as a human disease. By this I mean that the dengue virus is transmitted from mosquito parents to their offspring WITHOUT the need of humans at all (unlike say malaria, where a host organism (human) is needed for the parasite to breed). Therefore the actual situation is a chronic reservoir of virus in both mosquito AND human populations. A "healt
End of the world? (Score:3, Funny)
So (Score:3, Funny)
whatcouldpossiblygowrong, indeed.
The environment arguments are one-sided (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing that annoys me about the concern over certain mosquito species (some which aren't native) is that this ignores that poor people have the heaviest environmental impact. I doubt even a disruption of the local food chain is comparable. And what's one of the many ways to make lots of poor people? Sick people. Sick people miss work and incur health costs. They often get permanent disabilities. And that adds up especially when 100 million people get sick each year. And everyone that dies is someone who could have contributed to raising themselves and others out of poverty. And in case people have forgotten why poor people contribute more to environment problems, keep in mind that poor people cause more environmental damage both through lack of education, apathy, and because the small economic gain from considerable environmental damage can pay for food and such things. Further, they have a higher reproduction rate than wealthier people.
While disruption of food chains are well known, the current argument seems to be that we don't "know" what effects the proposed strategy will have on the environment. As I see it, the effects of poverty and overpopulation are well understood while the effects of food chain disruptions are also well understood. What else is there? And more importantly, if one were rational about it, how would you rank the potential for environmental damage either way? What mitigating factors can you use? As I see it, the effects of poverty and the role of disease in perpetuating that are clearly harmful in an environmental sense. The effects of food chain disruption are pretty clear as well. Keep in mind that humans have been killing mosquitos wholesale for quite some time and disrupting food chains when they do so. Finally, there seems to be unfounded concerns about the modified mosquitos with no justification given for that. Name the danger, the unintended consequence not some vague concern because humans did some unrelated and that had unintended consequences.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Take reproduction: in the poorest areas of the world, children are a "positive investment" - they provide free labor and are cheap to raise. This is obviously different in the U.S., where kids cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to raise and parents are lucky if they'll mow the lawn once a week. Plus, for a U.S. woman to have and raise a whole bunch of children incurs a large opportunity cost, because that woman could otherwise have a decently-paying job; in many parts of the world, economic opportunities for women outside of childbearing are very scarce.
Indeed, I think that sums it up nicely.
Now, let's say we wipe out all the mosquitos in sub-Saharan Africa and cure malaria and a whole host of other diseases. This will indeed help the people in those areas short-term and on an individual level. But it's not like as soon as they get off the sickbed they're going to go to work as accountants and tech support workers. They STILL won't have any infrastructure or economic opportunities, especially the women, and therefore they'll continue to chop down forests and have more children than can be supported.
My take is a little different. They will have some infrastructure and some economic opportunity. Not enough to undo a civil war or anarchic kleptocracy (a government barely capable of stealing from you) on its own. But it should be a significant boost even for the worst regions.
Now, I'm not saying you're wrong. Far from it. But I do think it's overstating the situation to say that killing these mosquitos will improve the social and economic situation of the affected people enough to alter their effect on the environment on a large level.
Actually, I disagree somewhat. We look at these regions as screwed up because of how they are organized. That is, bad governance causes disease outbreaks. But it's worth considering that
Programmers' days numbered (Score:5, Funny)
Programmers beware! You're next! This is only the tip of the iceburg:
Other effects (Score:3, Insightful)
But what about the 5 million people per year that suddenly aren't dieing of mosquito transmitted diseases? That's a lot of new people! The people that are making all these new people are going to have to dramatically change their life style. It's no longer "make more babies and hope they life". They'll have to make fewer babies and keep them fed. We went through that in the United States a couple hundred years ago as our medications got profoundly better, but it took time for people to catch on.
The populations in the areas most effected by this big of a change are going to experience HUGE population growth, doubling in years instead of decades or more. Can their cultures support that kind of growth?
Nice pets (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Genetically Engineered Mosquitoes (Score:5, Informative)
Hint: How the fuck are you supposed to breed lovebugs & mosquitoes? (Give them tiny little Jacuzzis and Play Barry White at them?)
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Re:Genetically Engineered Mosquitoes (Score:5, Funny)
I am sure cane toads [wikipedia.org] eat love bugs. I can get you a great deal on cane toads. They are priced per 100000 kilos
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