Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bastawhiz 2240 days ago
> He asked what he was missing and I pointed out that the headline was referring to malaria in mosquitoes, and not malaria in humans

Yes, but mosquitos are a vector for malaria in humans. If mosquitos are infected (at scale) with the microbe and can be cured or made "immune" to malaria, it effectively stops the transmission of malaria to people. If the science checks out and infected male mosquitos are released into the environment in areas with high (human) malaria infection rates, it becomes extremely easy (fast, cost effective, simple) to prevent new malaria infections in people.

This general approach is already being used today, albeit with less success. See Google's "Debug" project:

https://debug.com/

Dismissing the importance of the findings here as "only treating malaria in mosquitos" ignores the much broader implications of the research here. The headline is not sensational, and the perceived ambiguity in the headline does not decrease the significance or potential importance of the discovery.

1 comments

It's extremely trashy to quote someone when they didn't actually say the thing you put in quotation marks. Bother someone else with your straw-man bullshit.
I don't see any indication that you were misquoted.