[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

According to the WHO (http://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria)

* Malaria killed 445,000 people in 2016.

* Of those, 285,000 were children under the age of 5.

* There were 216 million cases of malaria in 2016.

That is a large city's worth of children dying every year, and a large country's population having severely reduced productivity.

And that is just one mosquito born illness.

The guaranteed human and economic benefits of wiping out mosquitoes, far outweigh any theoretical downside.

This group and other groups working to wipe out mosquitoes are truly doing humanity a great service.

[gascan]

The guaranteed human and economic benefits of wiping out mosquitoes, far outweigh any theoretical downside.

I like how you just state that, like it doesn't even matter what the downside was. What if bird populations crashed and a pestilence set upon crops worldwide, and caused mass starvation & millions dead- kind of exactly like what happened during the Great Leap Forward?

I'm not saying that would happen, but we can't just say "lots of people die of malaria, so don't even worry about the downside"

[zaroth]

There are literally thousands of species of mosquito which don’t bite humans. Just one sub-species which kills hundreds of thousands of human babies is being targeted.

It’s great to ask “what-if”?! This is a well studied problem of an invasive species where the scientific answer to your question is: there is no downside.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

>What if bird populations crashed and a pestilence set upon crops worldwide, and caused mass starvation & millions dead- kind of exactly like what happened during the Great Leap Forward?

Do you have any evidence at all that such a thing is likely to happen? What level of certainty that such an outcome won't happen are you aiming for? Others have noted that scientists have considered the effects of eradicating disease causing mosquitoes, and concluded that eradicating them won't to the best of our knowledge cause ecological problems. I showed evidence that around half a million people are dying every year from mosquito borne diseases. When 500,000 people are dying a year, you need more than just a vague feeling of unease not to support eradicating disease causing mosquitoes.

[pbhjpbhj]

Unclean drinking water supposedly kills 500,000 a year (eg https://www.news24.com/Green/News/two-billion-people-drinkin...).

We could probably fix that without need for any new technology and with only minimal changes to the eco-system. I wonder which costs more.

[Yes, I know it doesn't work like that and that these are not mutually exclusive.]

[BillinghamJ]

> The guaranteed human and economic benefits of wiping out mosquitoes, far outweigh any theoretical downside.

I don’t see how you can be so certain. We know that time and time again, the human race has thought this to be the case and ended up with serious resulting issues.

That’s not to say that the potential issues would be worse than 500k people per year, but I don’t see how we can say that with any real certainty.

[medunham97123]

I am all for wiping out Malaria, but wouldn't it be prudent to try and develop what-if scenarios and test them to see if there is an adverse ecological impact?

I would also be curious to know the business / funding arrangement details to see if there is any possible conflict of interest. No one will look for adverse impacts if the profit motive is persuasive enough not to look very hard.

[PeterisP]

It's not inherently prudent to wait and do more analysis; proceeding too quickly is dangerous since it may do harm, but proceeding too slowly is dangerous since people are dying right now and needlessly postponing a solution means needlessly murdering many people. There's a tradeoff of "carefulness" where beyond a certain level waiting to do extra analysis is harmful. For this particular species of mosquitoes we currently have a good reason to believe that we are beyond this point, we have enough information about the risks so that it's prudent to go ahead and, well, save lives.