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by BinaryResult 2573 days ago
I'm curious, if we had the power to just snap our fingers and irradiate all mosquitoes, do we have consensus to do so? I worry about unforeseeable consequences.
2 comments

I dont. Species go extinct all the time and we're already trying to kill them all with bad side effects like indiscriminate pesticides.

This is one case of me falling on the side of intervention. Malaria is a terrible scourge, primarily on children. So much so that humans evolved sickle cell anemia as a prevention.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/2/l_012_02.html

We only need to get rid of a few problematic subspecies that followed humans out of Africa. They're actually invasive so there's not a big risk to local ecosystems.

Namely

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anopheles

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aedes_aegypti