Mosquitoes Are a Growing Public Health Threat, Reversing Years of Progress (yahoo.com) 89
The New York Times reports that a "squadron of young scientists and an army of volunteers" are "waging an all-out war on a creature that threatens the health of more people than any other on earth: the mosquito."
They are testing new insecticides and ingenious new ways to deliver them. They are peering in windows at night, watching for the mosquitoes that home in on sleeping people. They are collecting blood — from babies, from moto-taxi drivers, from goat herders and from their goats — to track the parasites the mosquitoes carry. But Eric Ochomo, the entomologist leading this effort on the front lines of global public health, stood recently in the swampy grass, laptop in hand, and acknowledged a grim reality: "It seems as though the mosquitoes are winning."
Less than a decade ago, it was the humans who appeared to have gained the clear edge in the fight — more than a century old — against the mosquito. But over the past few years, that progress has not only stalled, it has reversed. The insecticides used since the 1970s, to spray in houses and on bed nets to protect sleeping children, have become far less effective; mosquitoes have evolved to survive them. After declining to a historic low in 2015, malaria cases and deaths are rising... This past summer, the United States saw its first locally transmitted cases of malaria in 20 years, with nine cases reported, in Texas, Florida and Maryland. "The situation has become challenging in new ways in places that have historically had these mosquitoes, and also at the same time other places are going to face new threats because of climate and environmental factors," Ochomo said...
Malaria has killed more people than any other disease over the course of human history. Until this century, the battle against the parasite was badly one-sided. Then, between 2000 and 2015, malaria cases dropped by one-third worldwide, and mortality decreased by nearly half, because of widespread use of insecticides inside homes, insecticide-coated bed nets and better treatments. Clinical trials showed promise for malaria vaccines that might protect the children who make up the bulk of malaria deaths. That success lured new investment and talk of wiping the disease out altogether.
But malaria deaths, which fell to a historic low of about 575,000 in 2019, rose significantly over the next two years and stood at 620,000 in 2021, the last year for which there is global data.
Thanks to antdude (Slashdot reader #79,039) for sharing the article.
Less than a decade ago, it was the humans who appeared to have gained the clear edge in the fight — more than a century old — against the mosquito. But over the past few years, that progress has not only stalled, it has reversed. The insecticides used since the 1970s, to spray in houses and on bed nets to protect sleeping children, have become far less effective; mosquitoes have evolved to survive them. After declining to a historic low in 2015, malaria cases and deaths are rising... This past summer, the United States saw its first locally transmitted cases of malaria in 20 years, with nine cases reported, in Texas, Florida and Maryland. "The situation has become challenging in new ways in places that have historically had these mosquitoes, and also at the same time other places are going to face new threats because of climate and environmental factors," Ochomo said...
Malaria has killed more people than any other disease over the course of human history. Until this century, the battle against the parasite was badly one-sided. Then, between 2000 and 2015, malaria cases dropped by one-third worldwide, and mortality decreased by nearly half, because of widespread use of insecticides inside homes, insecticide-coated bed nets and better treatments. Clinical trials showed promise for malaria vaccines that might protect the children who make up the bulk of malaria deaths. That success lured new investment and talk of wiping the disease out altogether.
But malaria deaths, which fell to a historic low of about 575,000 in 2019, rose significantly over the next two years and stood at 620,000 in 2021, the last year for which there is global data.
Thanks to antdude (Slashdot reader #79,039) for sharing the article.
I Breathed All That Poison In For Nothing? (Score:2)
Anyone remember the big trucks that went through the neighborhoods and sprayed that stuff?
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Yeah. It's a miracle I never got hit by a car while playing in it.
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^giggles^
Re:I Breathed All That Poison In For Nothing? (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, poison for bugs, obviously not you. Besides, malaria is just a fun day off school, right?
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I hated school, sign me up.
Not nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
Climate change really is the gift that keeps on giving.
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Oh so now we call it climate change. I still call it mankind's poisoning of it's own home. So easy to blame 'climate' for our own screw-ups. Gotta keep those sheep in fear. Bleed'em til the end then take all the cash and fly off to some place else you can drain and poison. *rant off
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Didn't you know that airliners and ships are caused by climate change?
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Well, of course. Poisoning your own area then having to move so you build a ship to do it. Pow!
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I moved to the Southwest of Texas and they do it here still.
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There was a dude who used to eat a teaspoon of the stuff before every lecture he gave, just to prove that it was non-toxic to humans.
Professor Kenneth Mellanby IIRC.
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Kenneth Mellanby IIRC.
Kenneth Mellanby RIP.
Whatever happened to GMO sterile (Score:2)
I remember a few years back they were going to release sterile mosquitoes to destroy the populations.
What happened to it?
Re:Whatever happened to GMO sterile (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember a few years back they were going to release sterile mosquitoes to destroy the populations.
What happened to it?
Here is one report [pnas.org] from Australia from 2021 which documents the use of sterile male mosquitoes during 2017 - 2018. This might be what you're looking for (first paragraph under Discussion):
We observed population suppression above 80% when the aggregate of the three treatment landscapes are compared to the aggregate of the three controls. We also demonstrated the effectiveness of the technique in driving bidirectional incompatibility in a field setting and observed the effect of this developing vector control method lasting well into the following season, with one of the three treatment landscapes showing over 97% suppression 11 mo later.
However:
However without barriers or boundaries, invasion back into the empty niche can occur rapidly as was observed in the American Verily study
In other words, releasing sterile male mosquitoes can suppress the mosquito population, but without continual effort the population will rebound as non-sterile males move into the treated area.
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Need to treat a wider area. If possible.
copy paste from earlier slashdot article (Score:2)
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Given that A) Aedes Aegypti is an invasive species and B) there are dozens of mosquitos that don't feed on humans as their preferred food source but otherwise occupy the same ecological niche and C) the vast majority of those species aren't carriers of malaria or dengue fever, this is unlikely.
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I remember a few years back they were going to release sterile mosquitoes to destroy the populations.
What happened to it?
A NIMBY heard the words "genetically modified" and stupidity took its course.
There were also a bunch of people who thought the bats would starve to death.
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It's a good idea to understand a situation (such as an ecosystem) before you start playing around with it. Otherwise you risk causing all sorts of unexpected outcomes.
Unfortunately scientists haven't even understood that basic principle yet, or the whole scientific ecosystem wouldn't have been taken over by cash,
Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (Score:2)
We sorted out the problem in the USA, and then promptly banned the rest of the world from using DDT. I guess a few million dead people are worth it.
Re:Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (Score:5, Informative)
The US is a signatory to the Stockholm Convention on POPs. That treaty allows for the use of DDT to control insects that spread malaria, including mosquitos. Unfortunately, the widespread misuse of DDT has resulted in mosquitos developing resistance to it.
https://www.epa.gov/ingredient... [epa.gov]
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You realize the bald eagle isn't extinct - right?
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This is the flipside of the "Lisa, I want to buy your rock" [youtube.com] line of thinking.
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This is correct. Nobody should believe the egg shell story today or that people thought the Earth was flat before Columbus.
These are silly folklore stories told to gullible children.
Re:Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (Score:4, Insightful)
You give it away when you imply that global warming is a fraud. Rising temperatures are measurable facts and facts can be proven. We could argue over why the world is warming, but not whether it is.
A reasonable argument could be made that any particular natural disaster cannot be attributed to global warming. I can't prove that wildfires, drought, hurricanes or massive snowstorms are caused by global warming. Most people are convinced that all these disasters together indicate that something has gone very wrong with planet earth. They didn't need to read a book to figure that out.
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"Give it away"? Check your reading comprehension - just like the other examples, a potential minor issue is blown into a existential crisis because no one would pay attention otherwise. That's simply fraud, the world is not going to end in 12 years, or end of 2024, or whatever idiotic thing they have said most recently. 5 deg F by the end of the century is a minor change compared to phanerzoic time, it will require some changes to deal with, but it is not a deadly crisis. Hence the use of the phrase "sensat
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I think you don't grasp the consequences part well enough.
Because of changes in weather patterns, areas that were once producing food (vegetables), fit to raise cattle or provide stable housing will not likely maintain that status. Sure, much of Earth surface won't be affected, but isn't also not fit to take over that role. This will lead to hunger and unrest in populations.
It has been a quite common practice from people that produce offspring, they migrate because they want their offspring to have a bette
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Holy crap, how old are you? I remember seeing a single bald eagle from birth to about 20 years old (1961-1981), my dad said they were fairly common in northern Michigan when he was young. Now there are scores of nesting pairs in the same area again. Yes, they almost went extinct.
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I'd have hated if that happened.
But I hate even more that hundreds of thousands of people (very conservative estimate), many of them children, died because of the lack of DDT or any effective alternative.
Mosquitos are the only species that typically kill more humans every year than other humans do. In order for human life and health to thrive, we need to be able to keep them under control.
(N.B.: I'm a West Nile survivor, and someone close to me lost a child to malaria).
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Not everything in the world is some sort of conspiracy.
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The biggest problem with Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane is that it's hard to pronounce. I feel like chemists should have made a less complex molecule. Maybe get rid of the two phenyl groups at least? The molecule also has too many chlorines on it looks like a dude standing on two phenyl groups.
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I'd be fine with banning DDT if we had a better/safer alternative. No one denies that it had its problems, including not only those that were commonly known, but many others. But, without a viable alternative, we continue to condemn tens if not not hundreds of millions of people to an unnecessary death.
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A mosquito cried out in pain:
"A chemist has poisoned my brain!"
The cause of his sorrow
Was para-dichloro
diphenyltrichloroethane
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We sorted out the problem in the USA, and then promptly banned the rest of the world from using DDT.
Describing something that never happened - ChatGPT is that you?
The U.S. has no power to 'ban the rest of the world from using DDT' and has DDT remained widespread after the U.S. banned its use within U.S. borders in 1972. Such widespread use that it became increasingly ineffective due to resistance in the mosquito population. DDT is widely used to control malarial mosquitoes today, and is recommended by WHO [nih.gov], but the existence of resistance has meant that its use shifts locally between that an alternate pest
stop seeking easy solutions (Score:1)
and learn from Singapore.
They go after habitats suitable for mosquitoes - on people's balconies, backyards, etc.
Periodical controls, huge fines... And it works.
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Re:stop seeking easy solutions (Score:4, Insightful)
Wanting to LIVE is something you'd suspect would be apolitical too, but lots of people in the US kept gathering indoors, maskless, in numbers during a pandemic, and fought like hell when people tried to stop them. Then fought to stop sane folks from excluding them from public spaces.
Don't ever underestimate what people can make political.
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>I suspect we agree on more than we disagree, but I also roll my fucking eyes at some of the extremes on "our" side. Once we knew more about the virus, which we did by late spring/early summer of 2020, it was perfectly reasonable for people without risk factors and comorbidities to want to return to some semblance of a normal life. The virus predominantly kills the elderly and the obese. I am neither.
"It kills people who aren't like me, I'd rather let them die horribly than take some precautions against
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Jesus Christ, you're an asshole, and I can honestly say that if you died your community would be better off for it.
Ouch. Speaking of assholes, I guess you can see the nearest one with only one mirror and without bending over. Why? You didn't read his post. He described a whole list of activities that DO NOT INCREASE COVID RISK. So the sentence about not being at risk was tone deaf. You just told him to go die.
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Re:stop seeking easy solutions (Score:4, Insightful)
Ronald Reagan told people the scariest words in the world are "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." Some of them believed it, and the line is as popular now as ever.
For true believers, the fact that there's a government agent knocking at the door overrides anything that he might or might not be there to do. Even if they let him talk long enough to communicate that it's something about mosquito control, the last sentence the true believer says before slamming the door will be something like:
"Nobody's going to tell my wife she has to empty her bird bath."
"It's your fault, you gave us these disease-ridden GMO mosquitos."
"The Constitution says I can do whatever I want."
[Trying to hand him an armload of literature on mosquito control] "I don't want your fake news and liberal propaganda."
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"The Constitution says I can do whatever I want."
That is only your interpretation of it. And it is not saying that at all. Another thing you are not likely wanting to hear: Any document that requires the amount of Amendments your Constitution got, it wasn't written all too well. That, or it gets continuously interpreted by people with a mindset that prefers "letter of the law", instead of "spirit of the law". An, to be honest, history has proven time and time again that situations never end well when that happens too often in a society.
Now, I live in Para
Re: stop seeking easy solutions (Score:1)
Re: stop seeking easy solutions (Score:4, Funny)
Hey, now take it easy on gun owners. The only way they feel brave is by strutting around with their guns. Add some faux camo gear and they become Arnie with a chip on his shoulder, able to frighten away their hobgoblins with but a click of their weapon. If they had any real balls, they'd give up their guns and volunteer in soup kitchen.
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The people we are trying to frighten away are not "hobgoblins," but, rather, people like you.
We don't want to hurt you and we certainly do not want to take away your rights or anything else.
We just want you to stay the fuck away, so we can protect innocents (and if possible even scum like you) from authoritarian "governments" that tend to murder their own people.
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I am a VERY strong 2nd Amendment supporter. I do not own any guns, I have no need of them. You can pry the 2nd Amendment from my cold dead hands (which you will gladly do).
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Re: stop seeking easy solutions (Score:2)
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Re: stop seeking easy solutions (Score:2)
Our country has interpreted the second amendment and the words well-regulated-militia to mean that every schizophrenic paranoid 18-year old with daddy issues gets his ar15 and plenty of ammo, and society is only allo
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Good point. Now all we must do is figure out how to shrink the N. American continent to the size of Singapore. Should be a piece of cake.
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Last we checked, the insect populations continue to drop quite rapidly. Yes, yes, the world will continue to exist. But need not exist with us in it.
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a few years years ago, when it was popular to talk about how "insects are dying out, and with them, entire ecosystems will die".
Are you suggesting that that statement is somehow false?
The human race has survived millennia even with some percentage dying of malaria. However, there is no evidence that we could survive without functioning ecosystems.
Bah! (Score:1, Funny)
Those of us who gargle chlorox and take our ivermectin don't have to worry about it. Let all those vaccine-taking losers die and take their microchips with them.
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Satire. Look it up.
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"Vaccines cause autism" and "everything I don't like is a Big Business Conspiracy" from the kook left are bad enough... meanwhile on the lunatic right we have "the Democratic candidate for President of the United States runs a global child smuggling pedophile ring out of the basement of a pizza shop that doesn't have a basement" which I think takes the cake for the most spectacular mass failure o
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"Vaccines cause autism" and "everything I don't like is a Big Business Conspiracy" may be from the kook left but they've certainly been taken up by the kook right as well in recent years. Interesting that you chose these as examples, because they've been combined into "Vaccines cause [any and every health problem] and are a Big Business Conspiracy". This is probably the most glaringly obvious example, but I've heard many more classically kook-left ideas coming from Trumpy-type family members lately.
To brin
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When I was a kid I heard a preacher rant against the dangers of an open mind. He said something along the lines of, rather than keep it open, shut the windows and lock the door when you leave.
I thought the "when you leave" part was revealing.
Mosquitoes are not a problem (Score:2, Funny)
It's true that mosquitoes have brought about more deaths than any other multi-cellular organism species (besides human). But it's the parasite they carry, not the mosquito itself. They aren't carrying the parasite willingly. As a result of this fear and intolerance to a slight sting at the injection site, humans have killed thousands of times more mosquitos than mosquitos have killed of them. Do you think an Anopheles gambiae mosquitos is like, "yeah, F these humans let me give them a parasite"? Instead of
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Great... after Malaria there is Zika, Dengue, West Nile, Chikungunya, and likely a few more. It is a hard problem to solve. Even Polio managed a resurgence.
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I've been dive-bombed by tiger mosquitoes (Score:3)
... one after the other in France. I was sitting on a 6th floor balcony, surrounded by pine trees. I'm not sure if they came from the tree canopy or flew up or what. But they literally hovered in the air and dive-bombed me every 30s. The one saving grace is they're much easier to catch than the small mosquitoes.
In case anyone doesn't know:
They have preferred feeding times: dawn and dusk.
They're attracted to the smell of unwashed socks.
DEET still works and lemon eucalyptus is almost as good.
Mosquito zapp
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DEET is pretty much miracle juice. Where I live has lots of swampy areas and for most of the year you'll get eaten alive by mosquitos in about 2 seconds, maybe you can stretch it to 60 seconds if you stay walking, but even in motion they will manage a landing on you. A few squirts of DEET and I can stand dead still and won't notice even 1 mosquito. Seems to work on ticks as well, and most of the insects you might want to keep away. Citronella doesn't work at all in my experience.
But stay away from the press
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City Malaria Issues for Africa (Score:3)
A really interesting article in NY Times was about the threat of invasive mosquitos for African city-dwellers and Malaria; historically it has been a rural issue and these mosquitos are pesticide-resistant and thrive in urban environments.
Personally I thought only one type of mosquito carried Malaria... the idea that different species can spread some of these diseases does not bode well for humanity.
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Well, linky [nytimes.com] got stripped.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/0... [nytimes.com]
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Paid for by the Gates foundation. (Score:2)
SO many ppl do NOT understand (Score:2)
But it gets worse. Back in the 30-
Mosquito fish, bats, and barn swallows (Score:2)