GM Mosquito Could Fight Malaria 281
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?"
GM Mosquito (Score:5, Funny)
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Great, just great (Score:5, Insightful)
Setting up for disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
-Rick
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!
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)
Re:Setting up for disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
-Rick
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.
Re:Setting up for disaster (Score:4, Insightful)
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-Rick
Re:Setting up for disaster (Score:4, Informative)
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The problem with most parsites is that they have very short life cycles. For that matter so do mosquitos.
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
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Thanks for that, I had to double check after you said that, I had Malaria and Yellow Fever mixed up. Yellow Fever has the Immunization, Malaria doesn't.
-Rick
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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
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From the summary:
They might not live longer but even a tiny survival advantage could result in huge number of extra mosquitoes. And we don't know what the chances are of the malaria parasite adapting to the new '
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Several people here have posted wondering if these new bugs will cause unexpected problems. Anyone with a tithe of theoretical or empirical biological knowledge will know that the question is not "if" but "when". Odd though it may sound, unexpected consequences are a certainty--we don't know what they are, but we can be absolutely sure they will happen.
Any competent project manager
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How about horses in America, and potatoes in Europe.
There are plenty of non-native plants and animals that have generally been a boon to society.
We should worry about unintended side effects, but that isn
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[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?
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I, for one... (Score:2, Insightful)
Mutant Mosquitoes (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Mutant Mosquitoes (Score:5, Funny)
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Well, if the research I painstakingly conducted in high school is accurate, the new mosquitoes will zoom down from the sky, snatch up humans, haul them up into the clouds, and transform them into mutants. The mutants fly erratically, fire weapons in all directions, and will be hella difficult for even the new F-22 Raptors to shoot down.
Good thing we've got smart-bomb technology.
Easy (Score:2)
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...
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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
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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.
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By malaria adapting to the 'super-mosquitos', it would be creating a different version of itself. Not a 'super-malaria', except from the point of view of the super-mosquitos. By being a different form of malaria specially-adapted to the new super-mosquitoes, we can expect it to be less virulent against humans. At start, anyhow. Given time, it may adapt to
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You're afraid to have your name -- excuse me, your Slashdot nick -- associated with your ideas?
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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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There's been a lot of articles written about how climate changes could move the malaria zone into the US as areas that do not experience freezes start to move further north. (Something with central Mexico being a natural barrier, etc)
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The reason we don't have malaria in the US is due to eradication efforts in the 20th century, that included drainage of swamps, destruction of standing water sites, DDT use (all these things for prevention), and most importantly, detection and treatment of malaria-infected humans, the natural resevoir of malaria in North America. It's the wealth and medical care in the US that has succeede
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Instead of making a GM super'squito to fight malaria (and later carry a worse payload in its robust little body) we should do nothing.
Let the humans adapt their behaviors and make different choices instead. If they won't, nature will continue to take its course.
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PGA
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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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Quinine is not expensive.
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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
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.
Just use DDT (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re:Just use DDT (Score:5, Informative)
See here for details. [timlambert.org]
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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.
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.
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I'm going to play a bit of the devil's advocate here, but overpopulation is the number one problem affecting Africa right now. The constant state of war? Due to too much demand for limited resources. Famine? Ditto. From a certain perspective, isn't allowing disease in Africa to wipe out a large portion of Africa's population a good thing?
Blech, I just disgusted myself with that argument -- but I'm not s
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Malaria is a special case as the plasmodium is also a true mosquito parasite: The mosquitoes are also weakened by the disease
The malaria resistant mosquito has a real evolutionary advantage over malaria infected ones and will tend to supplant them. For other diseases where mosquitoes are only a benign (for the mosquito) carrier, there is no evolutionary advantage and thus n
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Robots are the future.
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We have vaccines against those. One shot and you're good for ten years (at least for yellow fever, although you feel like hell for the first day; not sure on the specs for west nile).
There's no vaccine for malaria, nor will there likely be, since it isn't a virus or bacteria.
Keyword here is... (Score:2)
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).
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This is quite interesting since a natural mutation in humans, that which causes sickle cell anemia, has exactly the same chracteristic. Maybe it's even working in a similar way.
GM? (Score:2, Funny)
If you're gonna fix em, do it right (Score:2)
Why not make a super blood sucker that just thinks humans are the worst food choice on the menu? If the things didn't bit people, the problem is not just solved, but quality of life goes up too.
PR wise, which GM skeeter wins, the hearty disease free kind, or the just as likely to die but not bite people kind?
Whoops! (Score:2)
If they're trying to supplant existing mosquitoes with a breed more suited to survival, can't they just make them NOT feed on humans, for example? That'd be infinitely preferable, surely.
No you wouldn't. (Score:2)
Because if you produce a mosquito that does not feed on humans then you are doing nothing to prevent the 'unfit' human biting (HB) mosquitos from continuing to feed on humans.
Infact you actually make likely a worse outcome, by limiting the HB mosquitos to humans, you encourage them to adapt themselves to do a better job by specialization.
As a second point the reason why the HB mosquitos are unfit in comparison to the GM mosquito
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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.
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That was my first thought. I think that the risk of introducing GM PLANTS into the environment was unacceptable. Insects takes it to an entirely new level.
Haven't we learned enough from observations about invasive species to realize that randomly introducing a new organism into an ecosystem can have potentially devastating consequences? A mosquito that transmits AIDS is the nightmare scenario. What if
Frankenbugs! (Score:2, Troll)
> replacing an organism low on the food chain with a GM version?
Could be serious. The malaria parasite is a major factor in the control of the endemic species homo sapiens. Its elimination could result in a population bloom and habitat destruction.
> Between the news we saw last week and biomagnification, could this wind up substituting
> one problem for another?
Frankenbugs! Frankenbugs! Giant, 100' franken
Reads like a Horror Movie script to me. (Score:2)
Hmmmmmmm...
I kind of think if you live in a densly populated area, and right next door someone has TB or worse, and a mosquito bites the infected person and in a matter of a minute you get bit by the same insect, I believe you can get infected.
Viruses are not living things. It's genetic code with a protein coating. You can oblitorate it by destroying it, microwave it,
burn it, so
New Coke Flavor (Score:2)
Unfortunately... (Score:4, Funny)
Use the Lysine Contingency (Score:2)
The Coming Plague (Score:2, Informative)
"Following World War II the worlds public health community mounted two ambitious campaigns to eradicate microbes from the planet. One effort would succeed, becoming the greatest triumph of modern public health. The other would fail so miserably that the targeted microbes would increase both in number and in virulence, and the Homo sapiens death toll would soar. Humanity's great success story would be smallpox... On May 8, 1980, the World Health Assembly formally
How About... (Score:2)
Doesn't this scare anyone else? The GM version... (Score:2)
Man plays god again? (Score:2, Insightful)
On top of that, there is no mention of yellow fever, dengue fever, epidemic polyarthritis, Ri
GM Malaria (Score:2, Insightful)
Bah! (Score:2)
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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