Chikungunya, which can disable victims for years, is spreading rapidly, including in China and other places that have not seen it before.
Chikungunya, which can disable victims for years, is spreading rapidly, including in China and other places that have not seen it before.
Ok. Can we engineer the death of all mosquitos already?
Yes, but we’re afraid of the consequences. I’m all in myself.
We can kill just the species that bite humans. There are plenty of others for the birds and bats to eat.
I’m betting $10k mosquitoes will just evolve and survive but some obviously crucial other species will go extinct instead.
“Life… uh … finds a way”.gif
My initial thought. But at this point we’re already watching the planet burn.
We could have wiped them off the face of the Earth if we had pressed the attack with DDT for one more decade. Look how we did in America; Wiped malaria out in 1951. (Some of that was infrastructure improvements!)
Rest of the world was happily on their way and in 1972 the US said, “Fuck you, got my problem solved, banned.” Of course they couldn’t ban it in other countries but the US said, “No ban, no trade.”, which is a de facto ban.
One more decade and a concerted push could have eradicated mosquitoes. Then we could have banned it forever. That stupid bitch Rachel Carlson and her book Silent Spring raked up a malarial death count to rival Hitler.
I love learning about RFK Jr’s progenitors.
(can’t edit my posts, AGAIN)
And if you find that take hateful, consider that we’re hosing the planet down with other mosquito control chemicals. While not as bad as DDT, they’re still killing off the bottom of the food chain. If we had fought hard with DDT decades ago, we wouldn’t be continually spraying poison now.