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?"
This is a really risky move. Sure, the mosquitoes are now immune to Malaria and will no longer carry it. But what if this immunity protects them from some other virus that is capable of surviving in the mosquito for longer? Now you have suddenly increased the mosquito population, made it harder to kill the population and made them carriers for some new pathogen that may be just as deadly as Malaria. Genetically modifying something that low on the food change can and will have dramatic effects on the rest of the environment. Why would we run that risk for a problem that can be handled through immunization and treatment? Sure, medical coverage sucks ass in the jungle, but things could get a lot worse if the new mosquitoes carry a new problem into all of the local villages.
by Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 20 2007, @09:38AM (#18414045)
There was an old lady who genetically modified a fly I don't know why she modified a fly - perhaps she'll die! There was an old lady who modified a spider, That wriggled and wiggled and tiggled around her; She modified the spider to catch the fly; I don't know why she modified a fly - Perhaps she'll die! There was an old lady who modified a bird; How absurd to modify a bird. She modified the bird to catch the spider, She modified the spider to catch the fly; I don't know why she modified a fly - Perhaps she'll die! There was an old lady who modified a cat; Fancy that to modify a cat! She modified the cat to catch the bird, She modified the bird to catch the spider, She modified the spider to catch the fly; I don't know why she modified a fly - Perhaps she'll die! There was an old lady that modified a dog; What a hog, to modify a dog; She modified the dog to catch the cat, She modified the cat to catch the bird, She modified the bird to catch the spider, She modified the spider to catch the fly; I don't know why she modified a fly - Perhaps she'll die! There was an old lady who modified a cow, I don't know how she modified a cow; She modified the cow to catch the dog, She modified the dog to catch the cat, She modified the cat to catch the bird, She modified the bird to catch the spider, She modified the spider to catch the fly; I don't know why she modified a fly - Perhaps she'll die! There was an old lady who modified a horse... She's dead, of course!
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 unleash 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, t
The protein that is introduced is specific for malaria. And that is specific for the entry of Plasmodium, the protozoa (i.e. eukaryote) that causes malaria. I's not a virus, not even a bacterium. So your fears are unfounded, at least in the form that you stated them.
Even if you completely rule out any possibility of a new, or mutated virus/disease that may occur due to lack of competition of resources, you still have the numerous other mosquito borne diseases that will be on the rise due to the increase in mosquito population. Yellow Fever, West Nile, Encephalitis, and a hand full of other wonderful ailments would not be effect by the alteration, but would be effected by the increase in population.
The approach exploits the fact that the health of infected mosquitoes is itself compromised by the parasite they spread. Insects that cannot be invaded by the parasite are therefore likely to be fitter and out-compete their disease-carrying counterparts.
The only advantage the parasite free mosquitoes have is that they don't carry the parasite. Its not like they increased their breeding rate or anything. When there is a source of uninfected blood the GM mosquitoes lose their advantage.
The mosquito isn't the actual problem - the problem is if you create sufficient selective pressure against the malaria parasite, eventually you'll get malaria parasites resistant to the gene in these mosquitos and will be back at square 1 again.
Close, but not quite, you'll wind up WORSE off because you now have a bread of mosquitoes that are more likely to grow into adulthood. So not only do you have a new virus to worry about (one that may requires new R&D to develop immunizations and treatments for) but you also have a large mosquito population that is more resilient to traditional means of population control.
by Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 20 2007, @09:59AM (#18414377)
Where are you getting this BS about more resistent to population control? The reason that mosquitoes were in greater numbers was a lack of the malaria parasite in the mosquitoes. If the malaria parasite somehow mutated or evolved to these new mosquitoes, I would believe we would be back to square one, not worse off.
Because there is no immunization for malaria, and it kills some three million people annually. There is also no risk of a mosquito population boom, as their population is predictor limited. Mosquitoes also have a fixed life cycle length (4 days to 1 year) so there isn't a risk of them living longer and propagating some other epidemic. I'm personally worried about a different problem. Introducing genetic information through such a rapid process would dramatically decrease the genetic diversity of the mosquito
"I think it will be 10 to 20 years before transgenic mosquitoes are released into nature. It's very difficult to predict what will happen when we release these things," he added.
"There is quite a lot of research that needs to be done, both in terms of genetics and the ecology of the mosquitoes; and also research to address all the social, ethical and legal issues associated with releasing transgenic organisms into the environment."
It is good to see that the scientists involved are, well, being good scientists.
Why would we run that risk for a problem that can be handled through immunization and treatment?
Malaria isn't feasible to handle through immunization and treatment, because malaria occurs in wet, nasty, remote, impoverished, quarrelsome places. You may now argue that such problems can be handled with a sufficient application of dumptruck loads of money, but again, the dumptruck loads of money are not interested in being applied to those areas of the world.
Indeed, malaria has probably killed more humans than anything else in history. And now you sound like Marie Antoinette -- "Let them get treatment!"
The unintended consequences of these GM mosquitoes would have to be severe in order to outweigh such a colossal improvement in lifespan and quality-of-life as this would bring to all the unfashionable places in the world.
Now if we take the money needed to bring GM mosquito's to market and use it to buy vaccines, how much of the malaria problem can we solve?
None of it. No vaccine exists for malaria, though we've been trying to develop one for decades.
We could spend it on prophylactic drugs, but all the known prophylactics have serious side effects that make them unsuited for long-term use -- and long-term use would be required for people living their whole lives in a malarial area.
I think maybe you misunderstood. The only reason the GM mosquitoes survive better is because they do not have their health compromised by the malaria parasite. Specifically
"However, when both sets of insects were fed non-infected blood they competed equally well."
I disagree. I'll take that crap shoot. Under box number 1, you have a solution to a problem which kills millions upon millions of people. Under the mystery box you have perhaps nothing.
Honestly, I don't think the FUD is warranted. Oddly enough though, I thought of this same solution several years ago. Seemed like a pretty good thing to do. Just fix the genes and improve the bug and you have yourself a solution after a few years. I wonder if the religious right will get pissed that people are solving the world's problems using natural selection.
In theory the carrying capacity should be stable in the mosquito population (not suddenly over-run with bugs). Really all the improvement seems to do is make those mosquitoes immune to the parasite. So the new gene protects the mosquito and by proxy us. Basically they would be introducing a new gene into the population rather than a new bug. This improved gene should increase in frequency and as a result destroy the population of Malaria.
The article is wrong that the mosquito need compete better even in a malaria free environment. Why the hell would that be the case? We should only care about them in the malaria environment. In fact, it would be the best if they competed worse in areas without malaria. That way the gene population would drop very low when Malaria does. When the gene solves the problem, having it die out would be the best solution.
The food chain implys there are no cycles and cross-linkages so to speak.
Mosquitos eat plant matter [wikipedia.org] normally, only the females drink blood, and then only when they are pregnant. So most of the time they are quite low, and plenty of stuff eats them. Actually, the only mosquitos that are truely carnivorus for at least part of their life cycles (and in both genders), only eat other mosquito species at that stage...
Just beacause it's a predator in some cases, doen't mean it can't be prey in others: Consider that a wild dog/wolf will eat a a samller cat (or would be eaten by a lion or other big cat). In all of these cases of eating, it is a predator that eats another predator.
Yeah, uhhhhh, right. Malaria parasites, like all good parasites, don't kill their primary host right away. They live in its salivary glands so they can infect anything it bites. These mosquitoes aren't going to live longer. They just aren't going to kill people. Normally, that's counted as a good thing.
... what if... what if we don't do anything an people die from Malaria. You are trading off a sure gain over very hypothetical risks. Why is that? Why this bias for the status quo? What if the current mosquitoes are currently evolving to be better carriers of the West Nile and this will stop them... what if birds feeding on those mosquitoes don't get the bird flue? I doesn't make less or more sense than your scares. The point is, there is NOT necessary less risk in "not doing something" than in "doing something". Of course we can study those mosquitoes for years while people are dying of malaria, sure.
Oh, this kind of "scare", "precautionary principle" actually led to DDT being banned in the world, while it had almost crushed malaria in Africa.
"Oh, this kind of "scare", "precautionary principle" actually led to DDT being banned in the world, while it had almost crushed malaria in Africa." I don't see this as the same kind of debate, but I'm with you on DDT. The quintessential case of reactionary emotional responses overwhelming a logical cost-benefit analysis. For a while it was "DDT=good" so everybody decided they should use it to bathe their children and spray a 4" deep layer on every square inch of farmland. Then we discover that the stuff i
I, for one, welcome our new bloodsucking overlords.
But, seriously folks, those new GM mosquitoes will probably just cross breed with Africanized honeybees and take over the planet.
That depends on the strain of malaria contracted, and even then it is in dispute. (It is hard to tell if certain froms of malaria are cured or just dormant without removing your liver and dissecting it...)
This would do more than just prevent it, though: It has the potential to erradicate it: Malaria only spreads via mosquitos, and it needs a certain 'resident infected population' to remain viable in an area. If a large enough percentage of mosquitos don't transmit it, less people will be infected, and the desease could just die out from being unable to spread.
From what I see they are being careful: testing in contained environments the new mosquitos' reaction to various situations. This could be a very good thing...
you don't cure a people's inaccess to treatment by making different treatments.
Of course you do. This new treatment is not a new pill and does not necessarily have the same accessibility problems.
It may be more accessible because we don't need to distribute the cure to each individual person (you underestimate this cost). It may be a good idea and it may not be, but this development is exciting because it provides a new way to save the lives of millions of people from a horrible disease.
Who would have thought that we would build a better mosquito rather than continuing to try and control/eradicate them. I am concerned about unintended consequences, but this is fundamentally a new approach to modifying our environment... rather than trying to kill them off and ending up hurting food chains, we just "tweak" them to keep millions of people from dying from them...
Yeah, I have to agree... When I went to read the wiki on this, I was amazed to find out exacly how bad this disease is... 300-400 million infected each year, 1-3 million of those who end up dead, and probably millions more with permanent brain damage. There may be negative side effects, but its really hard to imagine the cure being worse than the disease.
Unless, of course, the parasite adapts to the new super-mosquitos and create a new, super malaria that is more infectious with a higher mortality rate.
No, killer bees aren't bad -- they were created by selective breeding, not direct genetic manipulation, which means they are "natural" and therefore not dangerous unlike these terrible GM mosquitos and GM corn abominations.
Well, the USA has already been doing the next best thing -- eradicating certain insect species by engineering worse versions. There are about a dozen noxious parasites that were wiped out in most of North and South America by introducing (literally) millions of sterilized males into the ecosystem for a few years in a row. The sterile males grow larger and healthier than their virile counterparts (on account of not needing to produce any sperm), and so females breed with them preferentially. It's extraordinarily effective. Ever seen a screw-worm fly infection? Extinctions aren't always a bad thing... Actually, I think that's why the USA no longer has any native reservoirs of Malaria. I know that the American southeast is theoretically an ideal Malaria-zone, and did indeed have Malarial reservoirs a few centuries ago.
The only reason it hasn't been applied to malarial mosquitoes in Asia and Africa is that there are something like two dozen species to deal with, and each one would require its own entire eradication program and on a much larger scale (it turns out that Asia is really big). That's what's cool about this idea -- it's a slightly more subtle variant of what the US has been doing for decades now. It's just more targetted -- eliminating the particular genes that allows malaria to be carried rather than the entire insect. And it avoids the need to breed millions or billions of the bugs yourself and releasing them every year -- the insects do it all for you, as long as the new alleles really are favourable.
Very clever -- IF it actually works. Goodness knows the people in the third-world don't need to have Malaria keep kicking them while they're down. Any chance to reduce the size of Malaria's bootprint is definitely worth a serious look.
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.
Surely the better solution is to use drugs etc to control Malaria instead of make some superbug that will eventually have some supermalaria? It's not as if controlling Malaria is an expensive or unknown problem.
It's not as if controlling Malaria is an expensive or unknown problem.
On that point you're very wrong. Sure, for Westerners its easy to travel to malaria ridden areas and not be affected; I recently spent a month in east Africa and spent well over £100 making sure I didn't get malaria. Unfortunately these drugs are horrendously expensive; for some places £100 could be ten years wages for somebody, or even an entire family. Spending £100 in a month is absolutely unimaginable.
Malaria kills millions of people each year. You're wrong, present methods of controlling malaria are expensive and unknown for the people that actually require them. I'm not sure that GM is the way to go, but I'm sure that something needs to be done, not for us holiday makers, but for those people that live in areas where malaria is rampant and the average wage is practically nothing a day.
And I'm a little worried that someone modded you as funny.
I love your assertion that all those people that have spent their entire lives and billions of billions of whatever currency you want to mention, missed something that you, random guy off Slashdot, knew all along.
I'm no expert in this sort of thing by any stretch of the imagination, but if it was all as easy and as cheap as you say, don't you think someone else would have also come up with the same idea?
I can just see some research scientist checking the front page of/. before making a phone call: "Sorry sir, it was all a waste of time, we should of stuck with Quinine all along. I've got plenty of it here, bring the Gin and meet me in my office after lunch".
It's also relatively useless against malaria, and has been for years. Pity, really, I rather enjoy a nice gin'n'tonic in malaria-infested areas. (Tonic water is flavored with quinine.)
About twenty years ago (last time I was in malaria country) the drug of choice was chloroquine -- a quinine derivative, yes, but not quinine. Even then, there were warnings about some areas where chloroquine-resistant malaria was prevalent. That resistance is pretty much everywhere, these days. The effective antimalarials are also pretty rough on the system if you're taking them for more than a couple of months.
Now just need to modify the mosquitoes more to only use rodents as their food source (and not as resistant to malaria or some disease that's fatal to rodents) so that they will help reduce the rodent population.
Okay, so they have a malaria resistant mosquito, and if there were no other effect of the GM, it seems like releasing the beastie to the environment would be a good thing as it substitutes a "less bad biter" for a "known bad biter" it the food chain and implicitly lowers the malarial infection rates.
My question is "what about the other major mosquito-transmitted illnesses carried by the same type(s)? AKA yellow fever, west nile, etc.?" as I assume there is a limit to how many disease vectors could be prevented by this technique without introducing unintended and perhaps unstoppable effects later on.
It may help to understand a bit about just why they are so populated. Most countries with huge populations rely to a large extent on extended families for social support. Cultural mores in such places place a very high emphasis on respect and care of elderly...as in "You can't just ship them off to the old folks home or let them die. You have to feed, house, clothe, and clean as needed." Inversely, the obligation on the young is huge to point of being required to neglect yourself if that is what it take
The PNAS study shows an additional effect that isn't quite covered by the blurb above: heterozygous mosquitos (those with only one copy of the gene) are more fit than homozygous mosquitos (those with two copies). This means that there is pressure to retain a large number of heterozygous individuals, which means there will be a mixed population of transgenic and non-transgenic mosquitos. While this might help humans in the short run (a smaller fraction of the mosquitos you're bitten by would carry Plasmodium, the malaria parasite), in the long run it pretty much guarantees that people will still get malaria, and the malaria parasite will have lots of opportunities to develop resistance to the introduced gene.
So it's a nice idea--and it would be more effective than releasing low-fitness transgenic mosquitos--but it's not quite there yet.
As to fears of biomagnification, mosquitos generally don't deal with stress by producing toxic compounds (unlike plants, who only have that option), and the transgenic protein is a protein and hence digestable. So it's very unlikely that there would be anything to magnify. Instead of worrying about creating toxic mosquitos, we should make sure that when we actually hit Plasmodium with drugs and modified mosquitos and so on, that we make things so difficult for it that it really devastates its population. Otherwise, we're just conducting a transgenic-mosquito-resistant Plasmodium breeding experiment. (Plasmodium has already developed at least some resistance to most common anti-malarial drugs).
...same researchers found that their Ubermosquito had developed a capability of transmitting AIDS now. That was an en even worse disappointment than when Malaria had developed a resistence and was spreading as before...
And: Ask our Australian friends about what people thought when they released a new species into their country versus what happened really. And scientists really claim they understand ecosystems? That's what I call dangerous.
Just so you know, a malaria vaccine is one of medicine's holy grails and there are researchers that have been working on that exact problem their whole adult lives.
Thing is, anything that lowers the infection rate -- with the stipulation that there are no other unintended bio-consequences -- at the mosquito level -- is superior because every dose of the vaccine has an associated production cost, where mosquitoes breed for free. So if the disease vector is disrupted for free 70% of the time now (and perhaps
There is no ban against using DDT for disease control. It's still used to fight malaria--in countries where widespread agricultural use of DDT has not made the local mosquitoes evolve DDT resistance. If it weren't for Silent Spring, there'd be a lot more DDT-resistant mosquitoes out there.
You're right -- instead of the white people on their high horses at cocktail parties, we better listen to the white people shouting at each other over the pro wrestling on TV as they slurp their Bud Light.
Or we could leave the ad homenim attacks aside, and take a look at the evidence.
Why do we have to create mutant mosquitos when we can use good old DDT? All we have to do is get rich, white people to get off their high horses at cocktail parties so the rest of the world can be saved from this horrible disease.
Wow, you paint an impressive caricature of anyone who could possibly disagree with you. However, your suggested solution (and the accompanying ad hominem) is just as simplistic as the opposing view that DDT is an unmitigated evil.
For someone who is not rich, white and at a cocktail party and yet still disagrees with you, I'd point to my wife, who is Nigerian and, like most of her family, has actually had malaria. She still thinks unrestrained use of DDT is a bad idea -- partly because, though much of Silent Spring was discredited, it is still a toxin that builds up substantially over the very long term, and it's a good idea to avoid that if you don't know the effects over the course of a lifetime, but especially because of the point that other responses have made, that if we did that then soon DDT would become useless, even in cases where we really did need it.
It would clearly be a stupid idea to recommend that every human being continuously take antibiotics. It is a similarly bad idea to say that entire ecosystems should be covered with DDT. Right now, use of DDT in moderation can handle particularly bad infestations. Heavy DDT use would lower malaria rates for a few years, before bringing it back up above todays levels because there would be no easy fix at all.
Your caricature of rich white people on high horses perpetuating disease among the poor and powerless is only at all legitimate if you yourself are not also essentially an armchair philosopher on this issue. If you are insulting other people for having opinions on how to effectively protect people, because they have no personal stake and are somewhat removed from the issue, then you'd better have some personal stake or be close to the issue before going on about your own opinions on the issue. Obviously I don't know your personal stake, if any -- but a lot of people who seem to feel the way you do are no closer to the issue than your hypothetical rich white people.
It would also be good to accept that people who oppose heavy DDT use are genuinely trying to protect people's lives, and have reasons for their opinions (even if you disagree with them), and it's not just that all of them freaked out after reading Silent Spring.
GM Mosquito (Score:5, Funny)
Great, just great (Score:5, Insightful)
Setting up for disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
-Rick
Parent
nursery wisdom (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know why she modified a fly - perhaps she'll die!
There was an old lady who modified a spider,
That wriggled and wiggled and tiggled around her;
She modified the spider to catch the fly;
I don't know why she modified a fly - Perhaps she'll die!
There was an old lady who modified a bird;
How absurd to modify a bird.
She modified the bird to catch the spider,
She modified the spider to catch the fly;
I don't know why she modified a fly - Perhaps she'll die!
There was an old lady who modified a cat;
Fancy that to modify a cat!
She modified the cat to catch the bird,
She modified the bird to catch the spider,
She modified the spider to catch the fly;
I don't know why she modified a fly - Perhaps she'll die!
There was an old lady that modified a dog;
What a hog, to modify a dog;
She modified the dog to catch the cat,
She modified the cat to catch the bird,
She modified the bird to catch the spider,
She modified the spider to catch the fly;
I don't know why she modified a fly - Perhaps she'll die!
There was an old lady who modified a cow,
I don't know how she modified a cow;
She modified the cow to catch the dog,
She modified the dog to catch the cat,
She modified the cat to catch the bird,
She modified the bird to catch the spider,
She modified the spider to catch the fly;
I don't know why she modified a fly - Perhaps she'll die!
There was an old lady who modified a horse...
She's dead, of course!
Parent
Ob. Simpsons (Score:3, Funny)
LISA: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
SKINNER: No problem. We simply unleash 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, t
Re:Setting up for disaster (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Setting up for disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
-Rick
Parent
Re:Setting up for disaster (Score:5, Informative)
The only advantage the parasite free mosquitoes have is that they don't carry the parasite. Its not like they increased their breeding rate or anything. When there is a source of uninfected blood the GM mosquitoes lose their advantage.
Parent
Re:Setting up for disaster (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
-Rick
Re:Setting up for disaster (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Because (Score:3, Interesting)
There is also no risk of a mosquito population boom, as their population is predictor limited. Mosquitoes also have a fixed life cycle length (4 days to 1 year) so there isn't a risk of them living longer and propagating some other epidemic.
I'm personally worried about a different problem. Introducing genetic information through such a rapid process would dramatically decrease the genetic diversity of the mosquito
Re:Setting up for disaster (Score:5, Informative)
This is a really risky move.
To be sure, but from TFA:
"I think it will be 10 to 20 years before transgenic mosquitoes are released into nature. It's very difficult to predict what will happen when we release these things," he added.
"There is quite a lot of research that needs to be done, both in terms of genetics and the ecology of the mosquitoes; and also research to address all the social, ethical and legal issues associated with releasing transgenic organisms into the environment."
It is good to see that the scientists involved are, well, being good scientists.
Parent
Re:Setting up for disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
Malaria isn't feasible to handle through immunization and treatment, because malaria occurs in wet, nasty, remote, impoverished, quarrelsome places. You may now argue that such problems can be handled with a sufficient application of dumptruck loads of money, but again, the dumptruck loads of money are not interested in being applied to those areas of the world.
Indeed, malaria has probably killed more humans than anything else in history. And now you sound like Marie Antoinette -- "Let them get treatment!"
The unintended consequences of these GM mosquitoes would have to be severe in order to outweigh such a colossal improvement in lifespan and quality-of-life as this would bring to all the unfashionable places in the world.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
None of it. No vaccine exists for malaria, though we've been trying to develop one for decades.
We could spend it on prophylactic drugs, but all the known prophylactics have serious side effects that make them unsuited for long-term use -- and long-term use would be required for people living their whole lives in a malarial area.
Spending the money on indoor residual DDT s
Where did it say they were harder to kill? (Score:5, Informative)
"However, when both sets of insects were fed non-infected blood they competed equally well."
They aren't harder to kill.
Parent
Re:Setting up for disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, I don't think the FUD is warranted. Oddly enough though, I thought of this same solution several years ago. Seemed like a pretty good thing to do. Just fix the genes and improve the bug and you have yourself a solution after a few years. I wonder if the religious right will get pissed that people are solving the world's problems using natural selection.
In theory the carrying capacity should be stable in the mosquito population (not suddenly over-run with bugs). Really all the improvement seems to do is make those mosquitoes immune to the parasite. So the new gene protects the mosquito and by proxy us. Basically they would be introducing a new gene into the population rather than a new bug. This improved gene should increase in frequency and as a result destroy the population of Malaria.
The article is wrong that the mosquito need compete better even in a malaria free environment. Why the hell would that be the case? We should only care about them in the malaria environment. In fact, it would be the best if they competed worse in areas without malaria. That way the gene population would drop very low when Malaria does. When the gene solves the problem, having it die out would be the best solution.
Parent
Re:Setting up for disaster (Score:5, Informative)
The food chain implys there are no cycles and cross-linkages so to speak.
Mosquitos eat plant matter [wikipedia.org] normally, only the females drink blood, and then only when they are pregnant. So most of the time they are quite low, and plenty of stuff eats them. Actually, the only mosquitos that are truely carnivorus for at least part of their life cycles (and in both genders), only eat other mosquito species at that stage...
Just beacause it's a predator in some cases, doen't mean it can't be prey in others: Consider that a wild dog/wolf will eat a a samller cat (or would be eaten by a lion or other big cat). In all of these cases of eating, it is a predator that eats another predator.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Great, just great (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, this kind of "scare", "precautionary principle" actually led to DDT being banned in the world, while it had almost crushed malaria in Africa.
Parent
Re:Great, just great/bring back DDT (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see this as the same kind of debate, but I'm with you on DDT. The quintessential case of reactionary emotional responses overwhelming a logical cost-benefit analysis. For a while it was "DDT=good" so everybody decided they should use it to bathe their children and spray a 4" deep layer on every square inch of farmland. Then we discover that the stuff i
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
[pokes self in eye]
Self, stop making these clichéd jokes. Sure, it was a low-hanging fruit, but really, can it possibly still be funny?
I, for one... (Score:2, Insightful)
Mutant Mosquitoes (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Mutant Mosquitoes (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
YES! NO MORE MALARIA! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Not Quite ... (Score:4, Insightful)
This would do more than just prevent it, though: It has the potential to erradicate it: Malaria only spreads via mosquitos, and it needs a certain 'resident infected population' to remain viable in an area. If a large enough percentage of mosquitos don't transmit it, less people will be infected, and the desease could just die out from being unable to spread.
From what I see they are being careful: testing in contained environments the new mosquitos' reaction to various situations. This could be a very good thing...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course you do. This new treatment is not a new pill and does not necessarily have the same accessibility problems.
It may be more accessible because we don't need to distribute the cure to each individual person (you underestimate this cost). It may be a good idea and it may not be, but this development is exciting because it provides a new way to save the lives of millions of people from a horrible disease.
Your argument is no
Building a better mosquito (Score:4, Insightful)
Who would have thought that we would build a better mosquito rather than continuing to try and control/eradicate them. I am concerned about unintended consequences, but this is fundamentally a new approach to modifying our environment... rather than trying to kill them off and ending up hurting food chains, we just "tweak" them to keep millions of people from dying from them...
I think it is a good thing.
//now, let the killer bee comparison commence
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Unless, of course, the parasite adapts to the new super-mosquitos and create a new, super malaria that is more infectious with a higher mortality rate.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You're afraid to have your name -- excuse me, your Slashdot nick -- associated with your ideas?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Better mosquitoes (Score:5, Interesting)
The only reason it hasn't been applied to malarial mosquitoes in Asia and Africa is that there are something like two dozen species to deal with, and each one would require its own entire eradication program and on a much larger scale (it turns out that Asia is really big). That's what's cool about this idea -- it's a slightly more subtle variant of what the US has been doing for decades now. It's just more targetted -- eliminating the particular genes that allows malaria to be carried rather than the entire insect. And it avoids the need to breed millions or billions of the bugs yourself and releasing them every year -- the insects do it all for you, as long as the new alleles really are favourable.
Very clever -- IF it actually works. Goodness knows the people in the third-world don't need to have Malaria keep kicking them while they're down. Any chance to reduce the size of Malaria's bootprint is definitely worth a serious look.
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Re: (Score:3)
PGA
Why am I reminded of this Simpsons exchange: (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Huh? (Score:2, Troll)
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Malaria kills millions of people each year. You're wrong, present methods of controlling malaria are expensive and unknown for the people that actually require them. I'm not sure that GM is the way to go, but I'm sure that something needs to be done, not for us holiday makers, but for those people that live in areas where malaria is rampant and the average wage is practically nothing a day.
And I'm a little worried that someone modded you as funny.
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Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm no expert in this sort of thing by any stretch of the imagination, but if it was all as easy and as cheap as you say, don't you think someone else would have also come up with the same idea?
I can just see some research scientist checking the front page of
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Re:Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
It's also relatively useless against malaria, and has been for years. Pity, really, I rather enjoy a nice gin'n'tonic in malaria-infested areas. (Tonic water is flavored with quinine.)
About twenty years ago (last time I was in malaria country) the drug of choice was chloroquine -- a quinine derivative, yes, but not quinine. Even then, there were warnings about some areas where chloroquine-resistant malaria was prevalent. That resistance is pretty much everywhere, these days. The effective antimalarials are also pretty rough on the system if you're taking them for more than a couple of months.
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more modification (Score:2)
Now just need to modify the mosquitoes more to only use rodents as their food source (and not as resistant to malaria or some disease that's fatal to rodents) so that they will help reduce the rodent population.
A good thing? depends.... (Score:5, Insightful)
My question is "what about the other major mosquito-transmitted illnesses carried by the same type(s)? AKA yellow fever, west nile, etc.?" as I assume there is a limit to how many disease vectors could be prevented by this technique without introducing unintended and perhaps unstoppable effects later on.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
One should pay attention to adaptation (Score:5, Interesting)
So it's a nice idea--and it would be more effective than releasing low-fitness transgenic mosquitos--but it's not quite there yet.
As to fears of biomagnification, mosquitos generally don't deal with stress by producing toxic compounds (unlike plants, who only have that option), and the transgenic protein is a protein and hence digestable. So it's very unlikely that there would be anything to magnify. Instead of worrying about creating toxic mosquitos, we should make sure that when we actually hit Plasmodium with drugs and modified mosquitos and so on, that we make things so difficult for it that it really devastates its population. Otherwise, we're just conducting a transgenic-mosquito-resistant Plasmodium breeding experiment. (Plasmodium has already developed at least some resistance to most common anti-malarial drugs).
Ten years later... (Score:3)
And: Ask our Australian friends about what people thought when they released a new species into their country versus what happened really. And scientists really claim they understand ecosystems? That's what I call dangerous.
Unfortunately... (Score:4, Funny)
Bah! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Thing is, anything that lowers the infection rate -- with the stipulation that there are no other unintended bio-consequences -- at the mosquito level -- is superior because every dose of the vaccine has an associated production cost, where mosquitoes breed for free. So if the disease vector is disrupted for free 70% of the time now (and perhaps
Re:Just use DDT (Score:5, Informative)
See here for details. [timlambert.org]
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Or we could leave the ad homenim attacks aside, and take a look at the evidence.
Re:Just use DDT (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do we have to create mutant mosquitos when we can use good old DDT? All we have to do is get rich, white people to get off their high horses at cocktail parties so the rest of the world can be saved from this horrible disease.
Wow, you paint an impressive caricature of anyone who could possibly disagree with you. However, your suggested solution (and the accompanying ad hominem) is just as simplistic as the opposing view that DDT is an unmitigated evil.
For someone who is not rich, white and at a cocktail party and yet still disagrees with you, I'd point to my wife, who is Nigerian and, like most of her family, has actually had malaria. She still thinks unrestrained use of DDT is a bad idea -- partly because, though much of Silent Spring was discredited, it is still a toxin that builds up substantially over the very long term, and it's a good idea to avoid that if you don't know the effects over the course of a lifetime, but especially because of the point that other responses have made, that if we did that then soon DDT would become useless, even in cases where we really did need it.
It would clearly be a stupid idea to recommend that every human being continuously take antibiotics. It is a similarly bad idea to say that entire ecosystems should be covered with DDT. Right now, use of DDT in moderation can handle particularly bad infestations. Heavy DDT use would lower malaria rates for a few years, before bringing it back up above todays levels because there would be no easy fix at all.
Your caricature of rich white people on high horses perpetuating disease among the poor and powerless is only at all legitimate if you yourself are not also essentially an armchair philosopher on this issue. If you are insulting other people for having opinions on how to effectively protect people, because they have no personal stake and are somewhat removed from the issue, then you'd better have some personal stake or be close to the issue before going on about your own opinions on the issue. Obviously I don't know your personal stake, if any -- but a lot of people who seem to feel the way you do are no closer to the issue than your hypothetical rich white people.
It would also be good to accept that people who oppose heavy DDT use are genuinely trying to protect people's lives, and have reasons for their opinions (even if you disagree with them), and it's not just that all of them freaked out after reading Silent Spring.
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