>Somewhere between 438,000 and 720,000 people were killed by the parasite in 2015. Seventy-two percent of those were kids younger than 5,
Sub Saharan Africa has a population of roughly 1 billion people. So this is about 1/2000 of the population that die every year from malaria. If this was happening in the US, say 150,000 people a year were dying from malaria every year, including 100,000 children, do you really think there would be this huge debate about wiping out these malaria species using CRISPR?
Wiping out disease carrying mosquitoes would be one of the best things that could be done for global health. It would disproportionately benefit poor countries in general and children in particular. It is a shame that we as humanity are not making an all out push to eliminate these disease carrying mosquitoes.
Most scientists are attempting to build a public consensus around using gene drives as a public health measure. It might be possible, though, for a single rogue scientist to introduce a self sustaining gene drive that could eliminate malaria, without seeking permission from any people, governments, or organizations.
I think it's difficult to weigh that sort of question without actually being the scientist in possession of the technology, believing it is safe and will be effective.
History probably gets written based more on whether it works out than on whether the decision was really morally sound based on what they knew about the safety.
Would you need to believe it's effective, or just safe? I think as long as you have justifiable high confidence in safety then you should take a shot even if it may not be perfectly effective, or might fail entirely.
If you don't believe it's effective, then why bother wasting any time on it? Water is safe, but not effective at treating malaria, so why aren't scientists spraying water on people with malaria? Exactly.
If you think it's 30% likely to work and 99.9% likely safe, you're in the case where you believe it's safe and you don't believe it will be effective (different from believing it will not be effective). I'd suggest this may be a good risk, depending on how unsafe it would be in the worst case.
I think so. If I were really rich, I would seriously look into this and try to recruit scientists. Hard to say if I would actually do it since I would need to gather information first.
The question is paradox, if wanting to do so is prerequisite to becoming able to do so. Secondly, the knowledge required to do so is prerequisite to determine some of the consequences. Third: other details outside of the specific field can only be understood by a larger group, so acting rogue would be flying blind. Specifically, I'm implying effects on the ecosystem, about which I at least have little idea.
The malaria that infects humans is only transmitted among humans so the ecosystem effects are fairly predictable and limited to the change in environmental impact attributable to the human populations currently impacted by malaria.
Prosperity tends to lead to both environmentalism and consumption, so the impacts will likely be a mix of positive and negative.
This doesn't target the pathogen, but the mosquitoes transmitting it. So the ecosystem effects are fairly different from those you implied. Although, I wouldn't know what those effects might be either way.
To answer the GP more concretely: It is far easier for me to ignore the crisis far away than to risk the tiniest chance of problems close by. Yes, that's deplorable.
There was a radio play (from ~20-25 years ago), where this is more or less the plot. Scientists find a cure to violence and unleash it on the world.
It was a chemical that makes everyone friendly. But what they didn't figure out was that it also makes you really stupid. So the scientists avoid the rain (because that's what transmits it), but after a while they all give into being stupid.
Some psychopath or group of psychopaths have already done this. If you try to research the disease, it goes into conspiracy land full of junk information so much that you won't be able to determine if the disease exists or not, by modifying the signal to noise ratio of useful information vs junk. Google Morgellions disease, you can't tell if its real or not. (I can't tell either) This is a purposeful psy-op campaign used by intelligence agencies called "poisoning the well". so this is a double-tap campaign: introduce a crazy disease, and increase fear/doubt/uncertainty about the science around it so people can't figure out if it is real or not.
The content of the article and the title of the article are in contradiction. Like the article mentions this likely would not eliminate malaria. You'd need a reproductive release and at that point nature kicks in with all the unforeseen consequences that entails, including resistance ultimately creating a 'super malaria.' And that really is the fundamental problem. We have a pretty bad track record with genetic engineering stuff. For instance one of the early selling point of genetically engineered crops is that it would mean we could reduce usage of herbicides. Glyphosate in particular is a very powerful herbicide that killed everything except what was engineered to be resistant to it. So get your glyphosate resistant crops, spray just a little bit, and you're set.
And it worked great. Until it didn't. Of course nature kicked in and invasive weeds started evolving natural resistance to the compound leading farmers to pour more and more of the stuff on their crops to try to kill them off - a cycle that continues to this day [1] with no end in sight. Needless to say, our total herbicide usage has skyrocketed from something that was supposed to dramatically reduce it. Citronella, bed nets, and if you're feeling real frisky - the introduction of natural predators seems perhaps more reasonable.
If I remember the procedure better, they radiated thousands of pounds of males so hey were sterile. They evidently only mate once, so it destroyed the population. I don't remember any real dissent discussion. The negatives of getting rid of them were minor compared to the pain and suffering this parasite introduced.
They are much more of what we think of as "tropical disease/parasite". I'd warn anyone looking at more detailed pictures other than wikipedia I linked.
I recall reading about this idea (but not using CRISPR, natch) in New Scientist back in the 1990's.
They covered off the precautionary principle / unintended consequences concern by proposing to retain a breeding stock of the target species in a closed system (say a greenhouse).
You'd be looking at a few years to deplete or render extinct the wild stock, during which time you could be sure the malaria pathogen was absent from your breeding stock.
Once malaria, and the modified mosquitoes, are confirmed absent from the wild, you have the option to re-introduce. Naturally the option also exists at any earlier time if the species turns out to be more important than originally determined.
Given that malaron can actually cure Malaria (and not just prevent it as most people think) by killing the plasmodium directly in the liver, I think all the money for all the projects against malaria would be better invested in creating a dedicated african run factory to make those locally and cheap.
Or planting a lot of Artemisia annua, since both the CNRS and the Gates foundation now recognize this plant is a good alternative.
Ending malaria may take decades. We can prevent millions of people from dying now.
I think you're talking about Malarone. It only gets rid of malaria in the red blood cells. Oftentimes it is prescribed in concert with other medications, like primaquine or something for that reason. In any case, malaria can infect you despite having taken Malarone. It can come back, or even persist, after having taken Malarone.
It's a good treatment, but malaria is a persistent little devil.
I went to the Pasteur institute for a diagnosis (which is basically the NASA of french biology) and saw a specialist in tropical diseases there.
The doctors nicely explained to me that the mix of Atovaquone–Proguanil does attack the parasite in the liver, not just in the blood cell, and that they had protocols to cure it.
Also Malerone is not good on your liver and does not give you 100% protection. I honestly never took my malerone while I travelled in a Malaria risk zone based on the stories I heard about the side effects.
I'm not sure if it was Malerone, but I think some Malaria prevention treatments before travelling to Asia in the late 90s. It had some pretty bad side-effects. I didn't get the weird dreams, but it affected my body enough that I just stopped talking it.
Yes, how do you think I got malaria in the first place ? I stopped Malarone after 3 months like everyone on site. Nobody wants to get damage organs. Lariam was worse though, it attacked the brain.
- You'd have to commit to doing that forever. Malaria is ridiculously hard to eradicate without going after the vectors, and you'd have to be providing a continual course of it. You're not talking about "An African run factory to make this cheap" - you're talking about a robust continent wide distribution system. That's not an easy thing to do.
I've run into these kinds of problems all the time thinking about interventions in Africa - a lot of them posit an availability of infrastructure that isn't there.
- The combination of drugs in Malaron slows the development of resistance, but doesn't stop it. What's your plan for drug resistant malaria?
We're already preventing millions of people from dying now. This isn't an all or nothing campaign.
That may well be what ultimately tips the balance, sadly - as climate change extends the range of anopheles and friends, associated tropical diseases including Malaria will start to appear in Europe and the US.
... and for bed bugs, and for fleas, and also for basically every insect that feeds on mammal blood. They are important vectors of transmitting a whole lot of diseases, some of which already dangerous to humans while others could easily mutate to become ones. We are already eradicating a lot of species. May as well exterminate bad ones. There are no ethical problems because no sane person feels bad about killing ticks. These species probably don't have any important ecological role (well maybe they speed up evolution a little bit, but in that case screw evolution). And in case anything goes wrong repopulating the whole globe with them would take no time.
I agree. I would not mourn if ticks were eradicated.
Off the top of my head the only ecological role I can think of for them is as food for tick-eating birds. But I don't think there are any birds that subsist exclusively on ticks, so they'd probably be all right.
And for our general literacy, I want to point out that ticks are arachnids, not insects.
Well all these species probably has role in horizontal gene transfer. They also help keeping animal population from growing too big. However it is very unlikely that any of this factors has any global effect. Some areas of the world don't have mosquitoes or ticks, in others they were eradicated with DDT and other chemicals. Observed negative consequences didn't have anything to do with eliminated targets.
It's possible that in some local areas some animals would be severely affected. But even in that case climate change already changing natural balance. For example ticks are almost culling deers. It is better to find new equilibrium while humanity still can have some control over the ecosystem.
There are serious nonfatal diseases. The Guinea worm doesn’t really kill anyone, but the eradication of it, along with other of the neglected tropical diseases, is still a boon to humanity. Reducing debilitating suffering is perfectly valid.
I see your point, but malaria is 1) debilitating and 2) kills hundreds of thousands per year. With unlimited funding for research, it would make sense to try to cure all the things. Since that's not the case, should we really be shifting priority away to diseases that effect fewer people?
Absolutely. Work should definitely proceed in parallel. The marginal utility of an extra dollar to a more or less fully funded research activity is small, even after factoring in the effect size. That same dollar spent on another disease could have much more benefit. Even without considering the varied research interests of scientists, or without considering any other human factors in the labor supply, the maximum benefit to humanity is not going to be achieved by throwing all or most money at a single disease.
Google shows this article about eradication of malaria in Corsica after WWII: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2927611/ . The mosquito population was suppressed by draining marshes and by spraying breeding grounds with insecticides such as DDT. If you disrupt the mosquito population for a few years, the malaria parasite will die out since it needs to be transmitted to humans or other animals as part of its life cycle.
Basically to get rid of it you have to kill the mosquitos or stop the people getting infected. That is hard with large jungle areas and tribal people who don't go see the doctor. In most places where people go to the doctor it does get wiped out. Eventually as Africa gets richer and people have modern facilities it would probably get sorted anyway but that may be a while. Things can go backwards too. In Venezuela it was mostly gone but has come back with the economic collapse.
There was malaria in Sweden and it was relatively common 250 years ago, especially in the archipelagos around Stockholm.
The climate is probably not the best for the parasite, but there was a number of changes that more or less unintentionally helped erradicate the disease.
First, there were enormous projects to improve farming. Basically all lakes became regulated and most wetlands were dried out to gain farmland. Before that there was a long period of improvements of living standards and hygiene - as simple as separate and better houses for the people rather than sharing a single house with the kettle. Glass windows got affordable for basically everyone, etc.
There are still mosquitos, including those that may transmit malaria, but the breeding opportunities and contamination paths got reduced below a critical level for the parasite.
I suspect that having cold winters helps, but I guess that the situation in Africa could be improved too with better houses and better control of potential breeding areas. It took a couple of hundred years in Sweden though..
I'm unclear how the modified mosquitoes replicate and spread if the genetic alteration sterilizes them. Do you just have to continue releasing the GMO versions, or is it not entirely effective, or what am I missing?
There were two different kind of mosquitos mentioned in the article.
The one you are talking about are sterile males. All they do is compete with the unmodified wild males, and can depress the population. As the mutation isn't passed onto any future generations, new males have to be continuously released. I remember reading somewhere else that this is already done in some places ( but I can't remember where I read it, so don't quote me on that ).
The other kind mentioned in the article are non-sterile mosquitoes designed with a trait, and paired with another set of genes that cause almost all offspring to carry the same traits. I think the article mentioned around 95% of the first generation would carry the change.
Pair that with a trait that causes more children to be male then female, and the population could be suppressed by only releasing one batch of altered males.
To me it sounds like a really good idea, but as mentioned in the article, once released there wouldn't be any way to really control where it spread.
We humans don't really have a very good track record of dealing with the things Nature throws at us as can be seen with countless examples invasive species (imported to solve some problem or other) wrecking havoc on native species, super-germs &etc.
I seem to recall reading that mosquitos are a staple food source for birds or bats or something, what could possibly go wrong with killing them all off?
Humans have a natural immunity to malaria but nobody is saying we need to genetically modify everyone to have sickle cell anemia.
I personally would like to put on trial for crimes against humanity ever single person arguing for a delay in using this technology. Let them argue in court why hundreds of thousands of people (mostly young children and pregnant women) should die every year so they can pontificate about "unintended consequences" from the comfort of their armchairs.
For the record people do not have a natural immunity to malaria and removing all human pathogen spreading mosquitos would have no direct impact on any natural ecosystem.
For the record people do not have a natural immunity to malaria.
People with sickle cell do. That's part of why certain genetic defects are prevalent in certain populations: survival of the fittest in circumstances where the alternative is worse.
I think they have signed "right to try" into law. But there are very good reasons we want to test stuff before taking a big step. People tend to die as our way of finding out the theory is only half baked.
That's how we got rounded airplane windows: by planes going down in gruesome crashes that killed everyone on board, thereby serving as a clue that there was a design flaw somewhere in our lovely new jets.
No people with one copy of the haemoglobin mutation that causes sickle cell are just less to die of Malaria. They still get infected.
Anyway this is totally irrelevant to the question of if we should continue to let people die while we sit around pontificating about unintended consequences. When the house is burning down it is not the time to talk about the unintended consequences of getting the carpet wet.
I'm just here (on HN) to make conversation. As far as I know, my comments here are in no way causing any scientists to be held back from rushing forward with their plans to do anything at all, whether mosquito related or not.
LOL. You are not one of the people I hold responsible for holding back this technology.
I am just expressing my extreme frustration at how something that could save millions of people is being held back because certain people are excessively cautious. I would like them held responsible for the deaths they are responsible for.
Speaking about young children and pregnant women...
I thought the "unintended consequences" of thalidomide was common knowledge and seen as a warning against the "look before you leap" mentality you're advocating.
The totally stupid thalidomide argument can be used to oppose anything new.
It is even a more stupid argument as thalidomide wasn't stopped in the USA because of any concern about "unintended consequences", it was stopped because of the incompetence and sloth of the FDA. The FDA would have approved thalidomide with no issues, the USA just got lucky that thalidomide was used elsewhere first and so the effects were noticed before it was released in the USA.
So basically your argument is we have this wonder cure (that may not even work, who knows?) that involves modifying the building blocks of life (which we barely understand) and we should just release it into the wild because "won't somebody, please, think of the children!"
Think The Simpsons did an episode on this involving gorillas and snakes or something.
Oh, and anyone who thinks that it's maybe is a good idea to study this irreversible idea a bit beforehand should be brought up on charges of Crimes Against Humanity.
And the thalidomide incident lead to the total rethinking on how drugs were approved throughout the world so the fact that it was or wasn't approved by the FDA is totally irrelevant to the discussion at hand, it was the catalyst of change that keeps people from willy-nilly releasing genetically modified insects into the wild today.
As far as I can tell they are actively working on this idea with test releases in Florida (on non-native mosquitoes) so it's not like anyone is trying to kill this idea as you imply. Ok, to be fair, some people are trying to kill this idea but that hasn't stopped them from releasing genetically modified mutants into the wild.
Thalidomide had nothing to do with the changes in how drugs are approved. The thalidomide "problem" was solved by never testing drugs in pregant women - of course if you are pregnant and get ill then tough luck.
The FDA has nothing to do with the regulation of genetically modified mosquitos as it is outside its regulatory control.
Yes plenty of people are trying to kill this idea and yes these people have slowed and will probably stop this idea ever being used. I would like them to be held responsible for the millions of deaths that result.
I seem to recall reading that mosquitos are a staple food source for birds or bats or something, what could possibly go wrong with killing them all off?
I am guilty of not reading the entire discussion here, so I apologize if this is a derail, but historically they outright eradicated the mosquitoes on some island... Which led to other things dying that ate the mosquitoes... Which led to yet more things dying.
I am failing to find a source, but maybe this blog post references it:
During WWII the Navy (which had a large base on the island) sprayed the village heavily with DDT to cut down the mosquito population. As you might imagine, DDT killed the mosquitoes...and most of the frogs, and is suspected of contributing to a number of cancer deaths on Ocracoke.
"That might sound disturbing from an ecological perspective, but mosquitoes don’t make up a significant portion of any known predator’s diet; there’s just not a lot of meat there. “So far there’s no evidence really that seems to show that Anopheles gambiae is a key species in the ecosystem,” Jonathan Kayondo, a senior research officer at the Uganda Virus Research Institute and a member of Target Malaria’s scientific team, told Fong. “There’s nothing that exclusively feeds on it. So I’m finding it hard to see how that would collapse the ecosystem, because that’s the fear most people have.”
You do realise that there is more than one species of mosquito? The human pathogen spreading species (less than 1% of all mosquito species) play no important role in any natural ecosystem.
Well, you see, what I did is search for the specific mosquito from the quoted text and found a link to a species of spider who's primary food source is the very same mosquito being discussed.
So either the scientist isn't very good at the google or just doesn't like "vampire spiders" and is lying about there being no predators for this mosquito. Whichever way you look at it this is the person you're trusting to release genetically modified organisms into the wild.
I was able to find one reference to this spider in the context of mosquito elimination:
Regarding ecological issues surrounding the release of sterile TMs, of particular importance is that a reduction in the number of Anopheles is unlikely to have a negative impact on local food chains. According to (Pennetier et al. 2010) there are no birds, fish or other insects that feed exclusively on Anopheles mosquitoes, the only known exception being Evarcha culicivora, an East African jumping spider that feeds indirectly on vertebrate blood by selecting blood-carrying female mosquitoes as preferred prey.
Even Evarcha culicivora will be fine as it is not just living off human disease carrying Anopheles species. Even if it was going to be wiped out I think that it is a minor price to pay to rid the world of Malaria.
Yet another reason to exterminate mosquitoes ASAP. People would continue to use every weapon available to kill them even just because they are annoying. However most chemicals we use today affect basically all insects. So we either eradicate mosquitoes now or continue to watch decline of bee population. I personally would chose bees over mosquitoes any day of the year.
DDT affects a lot more than just mosquitos. A gene drive wouldn't even kill all mosquitos, just the specific ones that spread human diseases. You can't compare the effects.
DDT was labeled as safe. It was sprayed on kids at swimming pools. Now we know it weakens birds eggs, and causes birth defects.
It's not a matter of it this genetic modification would have consequences, but what will those consequences and side effects be?
Our ecosystem is insanely complex, as show by the Biosphere II project. You can't just try to surgically alter one part without lots of unintended effects down the line.
I wasn't comparing the effects, just supporting the idea that unintended consequences are a thing and suggesting we even have a historical precedent involving mosquitoes per se should anyone be interested in trying to find a better source for the incident.
Another way to eliminate malaria is to modify it so that it kills the host, eventually eliminating the ability of malaria to replicate and go to extinction. I am not seriously suggesting this, but this is how nature works. There are unknown diseases in the past that have extincted themselves this way.
I can't speak with authority on many subjects, but as it happens, medicine is one that I maintained a deep familiarity with in a past life. (Medical and bio tech startups.)
There are over 200 surprisingly different species of Malaria. Humans are affected by five or six of them if I'm remembering everything correctly. Here is the thing, the number of species of birds, bats, antelope, monkeys, etc affected by those malaria strains is legion. So here's your problem in extremely simplified layman's terms, how do you make malaria kill ALL of its potential hosts? Then there is the question of Anopheles. Will your modifications kill that species as well? How do you stop the other 194 or 195 species of malaria from mutating to affect humans? Etc etc etc.
Continuing with overly simplified explanations, malaria has learned to "survive" over the past few million years. There are many parasites out there and I'd argue that malaria is far and away among the most savagely cunning in this respect.
What you propose is akin to the jedi handwave-y manner that people propose we "cure" cancer. It really is just not as simple as that. Historically, people have always found themselves to be "really, really, really close"...
We’ve managed to eradicate malaria in many parts of the world without any consequences, sure other strains may mutate but so far they haven’t.
If they do we’ll figure out how to deal with them when that happens.
Malaria isn’t the first parasite we’ve eradicated some of them we’ve eradicated globally and hopefully it won’t be the last.
The biggest problem isn’t the how but it’s how to do it in Africa where the infrastructure and the stability of governments across the entire region makes it a hard task to accomplish.
> We’ve managed to eradicate malaria in many parts of the world without any consequences...
As far as I know we've never eradicated anything by modifying genes which is the part most people are concerned with.
Sure, drain the swamps and/or use whatever methods worked in the past but think twice before releasing mosquitos into the wild which have the unfortunate side effect of turning crocodiles into Godzilla with a single bite. I've seen the movies and <<spoiler alert>> it doesn't turn out well.
Scientifically illiterate people are scared of GMOs in other news water is wet.
Also in several places malaria was eradicated using engineered mosquitos sure we didn’t use gene editing but rather much more coarse tools like radiation.
We’ve been producing GMO for 15 millennia if anyone thinks that throwing sperm at the wall or irradiating seeds is somehow not genetic engineering they need to get their facts in order.
Thats not how nature works. Diseases typically become less deadly over time since introduction to a new host; strains that terminate their host are less viable than ones that keep a long lived infectious one.
A mosquito that out competes other mosquitos while living a short hyperactive life is a better way to eliminate malaria by not giving it a necessary gestation period. Areas where a mosquito's life is short do not have malaria.
Diseases often die out because they run out of their food source .. same with some animals/predators. That's probably why so much of the bacterial around us has evolved to live symbiotically with the plants and animals around them.
Sub Saharan Africa has a population of roughly 1 billion people. So this is about 1/2000 of the population that die every year from malaria. If this was happening in the US, say 150,000 people a year were dying from malaria every year, including 100,000 children, do you really think there would be this huge debate about wiping out these malaria species using CRISPR?
Wiping out disease carrying mosquitoes would be one of the best things that could be done for global health. It would disproportionately benefit poor countries in general and children in particular. It is a shame that we as humanity are not making an all out push to eliminate these disease carrying mosquitoes.