Now is the time to eliminate mosquitoes

I got https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/4vhqoc/should_we_wipe_mosquitoes_off_the_face_of_the/ to the front page of Reddit, which probably got somewhere on the order of magnitude of 50,000 people to read it or at least think about the idea, which can only help in terms of moving it into the Overton Window.

I know at one point it was number 6 for logged out users.

Agreed! What would be the best approach (I'm a PhD student and vector-borne disease epidemiologist)?

• Writing one or more popular/lay articles
• Writing one or more technical/scholarly articles
• Writing a popular/lay book
• Writing a technical/scholarly book
• Starting an advocacy non-profit
• Performing an explicit cost-benefit analysis
• Modelling to determine the necessary conditions for eradication
• Something else... ?

I don't think that gene drives are the best technology when you account for the politics and indeed the post by Luke that you link doesn't use the term. SIT seems to be effective enough from a cost-benefit analysis and can be used in a very controlled way.

I look a while ago into the issue and wrote an LW post about it. I think there's a fair chance that pushing for gene drives mosquitos to be released will mean that mosquito elemintion will happen later rather than sooner.

Oxitec has today the technology that produes "sterile mosquitio" sterile for them means that the mosquitos die when they are larves. That means they compete in the early larve stage against other mosquito larves. Oxitec also inserts color coding genes to be able to proof that all of the offspring of the mosquitos they produce really dies and the genes that they produce really die.

It would be worthwhile if people think of mosquito erradication as being about release sterile mosquitos and not about releasing mutant GMO mosquitos.

If you actively want to do something on the PR front I think it would be worthwhile to contact someone at Oxitec and ask them what they think would be helpful. Maybe invite someone from Oxitec for your podcast and have a discussion with them about the strategic implications?

It's worthwhile to remember that the Obama administration was very effective about reducing Mercury pollution but not very effective about reducing CO2 pollution. More publish attention isn't always worthwhile to getting policy passed. Especially the scenario where a Republican Trump advocates a gene drive might mean that you get opposition from liberals who are currently against GMO's on the topic that prevents real action from happening.

Should we worry that if Trump supports eradicating mosquitoes, that will cause Trump opponents to oppose it?

Nature news

"Gene drives thwarted by emergence of resistant organisms"

"The Target Malaria team has developed a second generation of gene-drive mosquitoes, hoping to slow the development of resistance, says Andrea Crisanti, a molecular parasitologist at Imperial College London. The researchers plan to test them in their new Italian facility later this year to get a sense of how the mosquitoes might fare in the wild. But molecular biologist Tony Nolan, also at Imperial, expects evolution to throw up some surprises. He says that his greatest worry about gene drives is that they simply won’t work."

http://www.nature.com/news/gene-drives-thwarted-by-emergence-of-resistant-organisms-1.21397

more mosquito links, this is about weaponizing humans blood to poison mosquitoes.! weaponizing humans in new and ethically challenging ways.

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21710243-new-drug-dispenser-may-turn-human-beings-chemical-weapons-biter-bit

Consider reposting this on the EA Forum, might get more hits that way.

Mosquitoes fatally attracted to deadly, sweet-smelling potion

http://www.sciencecodex.com/mosquitoes-fatally-attracted-deadly-sweet-smelling-potion-461555

"Ultimately, they used a semiochemical blend in a matrix containing sugars and proteins to mimic 20 common chemical signals that attract mosquitoes to nectar-producing flowers and induce them to feed. Combining these compounds with insecticides such as pyrethroids or spinosad led to highly effective formulations. "

"In preliminary results, they found that mosquito populations plunged by two-thirds in just two weeks in Vetrax-treated communities compared to untreated ones. "

Bacteria could be key to freeing South Pacific of mosquitoes

Islands in the region could be rid of the biting insects within a decade.

http://www.nature.com/news/bacteria-could-be-key-to-freeing-south-pacific-of-mosquitoes-1.22392

"He and his team plan to do this using a technique that infects mosquitoes with a specific strain of a bacterium called Wolbachia. About 65% of insects around the world carry Wolbachia, but the strains vary. If mosquitoes with different strains mate, the resulting eggs develop incorrectly and don’t hatch. If there are enough of these doomed pairings, an area’s mosquito population usually dies out."

A mosquito trap that uses a person’s smell combined with warm water and a dark cylindrical shape could transform how the insects are caught in developing countries, say its creators."

http://www.scidev.net/global/disease/news/breakthrough-mosquito-trap.html#

Coetzee says to get protection throughout the night, the light would need to be switched on every two hours, which would disrupt human sleeping patterns as well as mosquito biting behaviour.

http://www.scidev.net/global/malaria/news/night-light-quells-mosquito-bites.html

a mosquito specific fungus that expresses scorpion toxins.

Improved efficacy of an arthropod toxin expressing fungus against insecticide-resistant malaria-vector mosquitoes

http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-03399-0

"We previously demonstrated that fungal pathogens can provide an effective delivery system for mosquitocidal or malariacidal biomolecules. Here we compared genes from arthropod predators encoding insect specific sodium, potassium and calcium channel blockers"

"In conclusion, fungi can be genetically modified to strategically maximize their success as biocontrol agents. When their impact on malaria transmission is considered, transgenic fungi applied on sheets meet WHO standards for effective control of malaria within 5 days post-exposure, indicating that the inclusion of transgenic Metarhizium in pre-existing control efforts would effectively decrease malaria transmission. "

Cationic amino acid transporters play key roles in the survival and transmission of apicomplexan parasites.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28205520?dopt=Abstract#

Association between Toxoplasma gondii seropositivity and memory function in nondemented older adults.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28235681?dopt=Abstract#

report an experimental molecule that inhibits kidney function in mosquitoes and thus might provide a new way to control the deadliest animal on Earth.

"What our compounds do is stop urine production, so they swell up and can't volume regulate, and in some cases they just pop," he said.

"By targeting blood feeding female mosquitoes, we predict that there will be less selective pressure for the emergence of resistant mutations," Denton said.

The investigators show VU041 to be effective when applied topically, which indicates that it potentially could be adapted as a sprayed insecticide. They also show that it doesn't harm honeybees.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-12/vumc-ei120516.php

Visual guide to hacked mosquitoes

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/a-visual-guide-to-modified-mosquitoes/

and they say at end of article that large scale tests in urban areas of brazil next year

The lab where they intentionally infect people with malaria to run "challenge" studies.

http://www.businessinsider.com/malaria-challenge-trials-research-seattle-gates-2016-11\

another group working on mosquito reduction.

https://debugproject.com/faqs/

According to Technology Review Gates is targeting 2029 for releasing gene drive mosquitoes.

I didn't know there was even a group out there taking the discussion to it's limits, Interesting read.

"What principle(s) should govern our stewardship of the rest of the living world? How many of the traditional horrors of "Nature, red in tooth and claw" should we promote and perpetuate? Alternatively, insofar we want to preserve traditional forms of Darwinian life, should we aim for an ethic of compassionate stewardship instead. Cognitively, nonhuman animals are akin to small children. They need caring for as such."

http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-radical-plan-to-eliminate-earths-predatory-species-1613342963

"I look forward to a future where all sentient beings enjoy life animated by gradients of bliss"

Is it a good idea to leave alive mosquitos that don't bite humans? How long would it take them to mutate and fill the "human bloodsucking" niche that is suddenly vacant?

Perhaps a more comprehensive program of disease vector eradication is in order. Any organism that acts as a flying hypodermic needle poses the risk of moving pathogens around between species. For that matter, there are a lot of parasites in the world that parasitise mammals. If they were all to be eradicated, predators could take up the slack, but predators such as foxes, wolves or lions are trivially easy for us to control in comparison.

Natural ecosystems are de facto bioterrorist labs that occasionally output horrors like AIDS and ebola and zika. Maybe human beings need to start a serious and far-reaching effort to shut them down.

Note that with a goal to eliminate a species completely, the longer you wait to get experience and perfected technology, the better.

A major screw up in such a case would be some random factor, mutation etc. preventing us from wiping all mosquitoes, and leaving a group that would be resistant to current gene-drive technology.

I don't know enough about gene-drives to suggest how it might happen - but the point is that there are always "unknown unknowns".

That smaller group would then quickly spread and replace the previous population, and would be harder to deal with.

Repeat a few times, and you have gradually nudged the population of mosquitoes to be resistant to our attempts to eliminate it.

It's possible that waiting longer and using a better technology in the first strike, would have solved the problem cleanly.

This is probably a good idea. My take is that most of resistance I'm culturally aware of would come from people concerned about an irreversible change to the ecosystem, whether or not this concern is warranted. Potentially worth investigating/getting some experts on your side/proposing a contained preservation of a mosquito population (the way we preserve rare diseases)

If it is possible to drive mosquitoes to extinction, it is a good idea, but it sounds difficult to me. It would be easier to to use gene drive to spread antimalarial drugs. This sounds complicated, but people have done it in the lab. By aligning the gene drive with the fitness of the mosquitoes, it is more likely to work. It does not preclude future extermination. But this is a complicated mechanism, not easily adaptable to, say, Zika.

Not that it's relevant, but the claim that malaria has killed half of humans who have lived is completely absurd. Falciparum malaria is nasty because it has only recently jumped to humans. With time, it would adapt to be less deadly, to better spread, and humans would adapt to be less vulnerable. This is exactly what happened to vivax ("benign") malaria. Vivax jumped to humans 35k years ago, while falciparum only 5k years ago. The genus Homo was free of malaria for millions of years. If you define humans as starting 50k years ago, then some form of malaria was present for most of that time, although how deadly it was varied a lot over the millennia.

Most prediction markets give Hillary Clinton an advantage over Donald Trump. In general, if one candidate comes out in favor of something, the supporters of the other candidate will be more likely to oppose that thing (all else equal). Doesn't this suggest attempting to get Clinton to come out in favor of eradicating mosquitos is the better strategy?

Is there a possibility that those diseases will move to a different animal?

Malaria infections up in the US, mostly due to travel

"The study showed that malaria hospitalizations were more common in the U.S. than hospitalizations for many other travel-associated diseases. For example, during the same period, dengue fever, which is common in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and throughout Latin America, and has caused small, local outbreaks in south Florida and Texas, generated, on average, 259 hospitalizations a year compared with 1,489 for malaria.

According to the study, malaria hospitalizations are quite common in the U.S., and the associated burden from these cases is substantial. The researchers found that the average cost per patient was about $25,800 and that the total bill for treating malaria patients in the U.S. from 2000 to 2014 was about $555 million."

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-04/b-mst041917.php

Artemisia annua dried leaf tablets treated malaria resistant to ACT and i.v. artesunate

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0944711317300570

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-04/wpi-pwd042417.php

" After five days of treatment with tablets made from only the dried and powered leaves of Artemisia , all 18 patients fully recovered. Laboratory tests showed they had no parasites remaining in their blood. (Weathers noted more than 100 other drug-resistant patients also have been successfully treated with DLA tablets.)

Natural Selection Is About to Be Overpowered by the First-Ever Mammalian Gene Drive"

"If the new gene drives prove effective and New Zealand’s plan moves forward, this marks the first use of the technology to wipe out entire local populations of an animal species"

https://singularityhub.com/2017/03/02/natural-selection-is-about-to-be-overpowered-by-the-first-ever-mammalian-gene-drive/

"A workaround is the Trojan female approach, spearheaded by Dr. Daniel Tompkins at the Landcare Research organization based in New Zealand. The technology works by targeting mitochondria, tiny powerhouses in cells that provide energy for sperm to swim normally.

Mutations in mitochondrial DNA seriously decrease sperm mobility and male fertility. Here’s the clever part: because mitochondria are passed down only from the mom, they can survive natural selection. In other words, moms carrying the mutations will have infertile sons, but their daughters (also carrying the mutation) would be able to breed again, producing yet more infertile males."

I haven't done anything, but I applaud you for doing stuff. Good luck saving all those people.