This Malaria Preventing Mosquito Is Not A GMO But Is A Science Boost For Nature – Will Activists Want To Block It?
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H. Campbell,
science 2.0,
2021.
Mosquitoes like Aedes aegypti don’t have any value ecologically. If Thanos snapped them out of existence tomorrow there is nothing they do that won’t immediately be taken up by 3,000 other mosquito species, not to mention 25,000 bee species when it comes to pollination. The only thing they are great at is killing people; by being a leading source of vector-borne dengue disease. Not far behind is Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes, which carry malaria. Malaria kills nearly as many people each year as COVID-19 did in 2020 but there is no Warp Speed program to keep poor people in developing nations from dying. Environmental activists (overwhelmingly white and wealthy) instead spend $2 billion a year scaring people of color in other countries about science. Pesticides wiped out malaria in the U.S.(1) and remain the best way to go. DDT still works well and is in common use in afflicted countries.(2) Though banned politically in the U.S. half a century ago, our EPA literally writes the manual for how to spray it in homes elsewhere, but the Rachel Carson dream was to replace pesticides with genetically modified crops – optimizing nature to keep other parts of nature from killing everything using fewer chemicals. More related to this: Scientists are now playing god with mosquitoes Researchers Using Mutant Mosquitoes To End Malaria, Which Kills 4 Lakh Per Year Playing God and tampering with nature: popular labels for real concerns in synthetic biology Brave New Planet: Reshaping Nature Through Gene Drives
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