Imagining a world without them:
“The ecological effect of eliminating harmful mosquitoes is that you have more people. That’s the consequence,” says Strickman. Many lives would be saved; many more would no longer be sapped by disease. Countries freed of their high malaria burden, for example in sub-Saharan Africa, might recover the 1.3% of growth in gross domestic product that the World Health Organization estimates they are cost by the disease each year, potentially accelerating their development. There would be “less burden on the health system and hospitals, redirection of public-health expenditure for vector-borne diseases control to other priority health issues, less absenteeism from schools”, says Jeffrey Hii, malaria scientist for the World Health Organization in Manila.
They kill more humans than any other animal species, by many orders of magnitude. I wouldn’t miss them.
[Update a few minutes later]
We have the technology to wipe out all Zika-spreading mosquitos.
Why stop there? Go after every species that vectors blood. As the article notes, though, gene drive is not without risk.
I’m not a big fan of genetic engineering of this sort. It sounds like a bioweapon of the sorts you can read in Frank Herbert’s “White Plague”. There is such a thing as horizontal gene transfer. It makes me feel a bit anxious about these kinds of techniques even if there was no malice intended at any point.
But we have enough pesticides to kill all the mosquitoes you can think of. DDT is one. I would prefer that. Megadoses of DDT everywhere. It worked during WWII. I think Cuba and Panama were also known for having malaria at one point until the US Army Corps started isolating malaria patients under tents, covering or drying stagnated open water bodies close to homes and spraying everywhere with pesticides.
The thing about DDT, a far more judicious application than was used back in the day would have been effective, with less impact on beneficial insects.
Lice, scabies, fleas, and ticks next up.
The insect species list is varied enough to quickly fill any necessary niches opened up. And if whatever evolves to fill those niches has ‘human parasite’ on their resume, well, their dominance of that particular niche will be a very short one.
To those modern day Malthusians with species self-hatred, saving lives by eradicating malaria is not what they want. No pun intended, but the millions of malaria deaths aren’t a bug but a feature.
I’d be very wary of eliminating an entire species unless you completely understand their role in the ecology.
And like most things, I bet we don’t understand. Too complicated.
Even more so with eliminating all blood suckers.
We had the technology to eradicate malaria in the US three quarters of a century ago: public engineering projects to drain Florida and Louisiana swamps, plus liberal application of DDT.
That was, of course, a very long time ago, and if you tried such a thing in the 21st Century you’d have envirowackos rioting and lobbing Molotov cocktails at the bulldozers, and all the talking heads on the TV news would nod solemnly and tell us all how heroic they were–protecting the environment like Captain Planet, and all that. (“The past is another country. They do things differently there.”)
Tread lightly. Would prefer a test planet for clinical trials. Not our own.
Zika is a virus that was identified back in the ’40s or ’50s, it survives in a fairly narrow equatorial band, it has been around the world several times since originally identified, and it has always been labeled as a virus with little or no symptoms. What is really going on here? The Brazilian medical community is backpedaling big time on their original assessment, essentially saying they can only “associate” the virus (whatever that means) with about 400 of the original 4000 cases they reported. But then again, their original claim of 4000 cases in Brazil’s population of 200 million is still negligible. What happened that caused the media to label such a low number of cases as a pandemic?
Yes, there could be new discoveries related to microcephaly, but considering Brazil’s extensive use of pesticides, the “pandemic” label from WHO and CDC seems a bit reckless, but that may be the new normal given their prior similar labels for swine flu…at one point they were claiming 40 million cases of swine flu in the US. Gotta keep the populace cowering in fear and forever dependent on the government to think for them.