[mgraczyk]

Hello from Miami. Sorry but your assessment is just a luddite fallacy. You point out potential harm without acknowledging any potential benefits. It's clear to me that the potential benefits massively outweigh the potential harms.

The potential harms you point out are tiny compared to the millions of lives ruined and hundreds of thousands of deaths caused each year by malaria.

[thebean11]

> hundreds of thousands of deaths caused each year by malaria.

I might be missing something..there are people dying of malaria in Florida?

Or you're saying that doing the test in Florida will help to get this technology to places where malaria is common?

Put another way, are there in potential benefits for the people living in the testing sites?

[Turing_Machine]

This species of mosquito spreads yellow fever, dengue, zika, chikungunya, and several other diseases. Malaria-carrying mosquitos are in another genus.

And yeah, people absolutely do die from those, and even if they don't, they are horrible diseases that can produce long-term health effects.

The case fatality rate for yellow fever is 15-50% (I'm guessing strongly dependent on whether the victim has access to modern hospitalization).

https://www.who.int/csr/resources/publications/yellowfev/CSR...

[mgraczyk]

Yes, because of Zika and dengue as other commenters have mentioned.

But that shouldn't really matter. We should fight for a system where obviously-good work can be done even if NIMBYs don't directly benefit from the work. If we're forced into we're forced into talking about how to placate/bribe Florida residents, then we've already lost.

[kbenson]

> Put another way, are there in potential benefits for the people living in the testing sites?

The submitted article mentions Zika in the first paragraph. So reducing Zika cases spread by mosquitos is one potential benefit.

[slowmovintarget]

I'm all for reducing the EEE in the Greater Boston Area, too.

There are only four species of mosquito that bite humans. They are a tiny part of the food chain, and would be completely replaced by other food sources.

It's also not the first time humans have successfully made this kind of intervention.

Here's an article from 2016 about the same thing (it even mentions Oxitec): https://slate.com/technology/2016/01/zika-carrying-mosquitoe...

(I believe it was posted to HN a while back, but the article stuck with me as we don't dare enjoy the outdoors here for fear of our child getting Eastern Equine Encephalitis: https://www.cdc.gov/easternequineencephalitis/index.html )

[teh_infallible]

The article said they were trying to combat dengue, and that it affected about 60 people.

[mgraczyk]

This research is a proof-of-concept for future work on a larger scale.