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More on Mosquitoes (New Data)

I’ve returned to the question of mosquito eradication several times over the last year. My first post (Eradication’s Good Intentions) led to a TechCrunch article (What Would It Mean to Eradicate the Mosquito?) and you would think that I’d be done with the topic, especially in light of the long list of other topics that I have.

But that’s not the case. Mosquitoes are a story of second-order effects that keep coming up. As major carriers of disease, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths each year, mosquito eradication will be a topic that remains as long as the diseases remain. But unlike some other high-risk actions, the mosquito question draws a wide mix of people on both sides of the eradication argument. I return to the mosquito eradication question today because of new published data. Continue reading “More on Mosquitoes (New Data)”

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Incentives

The story had paused for more than two thousand years and with a surprise discovery was then suddenly back in play. In the 1940s and 1950s a sad mismatch of incentives after the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls led to the destruction of parts of the ancient biblical documents. That destruction was something that no one wanted and yet, with these priceless historical items, it was logical. Why? Continue reading “Incentives”

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Eradication’s Good Intentions (Mosquitoes & More)

While AIDS, cancer, and heart disease get the headlines, malaria still kills large numbers of people. An estimated range of annual deaths from malaria is 435K to 720K a year (2015), with 90% of deaths located in Africa. These numbers have decreased significantly in the last 10 years but also note that 70% of deaths are from the under 5-year old age group.

Unlike the other diseases mentioned above, the way people get malaria and the way the disease spreads is different. That means when it comes to considering eradicating the many species of single-celled plasmodium parasite that cause malaria, some plans actually call for the eradication of mosquitoes — the vector carrying the parasite and infecting humans.

This post is speculative since malaria and mosquito eradication have not been tried except locally. But there are proposals for global or regional mosquito eradication. In a connected global ecosystem, where connections are not well-understood (or are they?), where do you take a risk? Would the decision to eradicate mosquitoes already have been made if malaria deaths were mostly based in other parts of the world? What could be unintended consequences of mosquito eradication? Continue reading “Eradication’s Good Intentions (Mosquitoes & More)”