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Brazilians Welcome Genetically-Modified Mosquito To Help Fight Dengue Fever
An anonymous reader writes "The Brazilian government have decided to try battling the spread of dengue fever with GM mosquitoes. 'Now, with dengue endemic in three of the host cities for this summer's World Cup , Brazilian health officials are trying a radical new approach — biotechnology. They've begun a two-year trial release of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that have been genetically modified. "We need to provide the government alternatives because the system we are using now in Brazil doesn't work," says Aldo Malavasi, president of Moscamed, the Brazilian company that's running the trial from a lab just outside of Jacobina. The new breed of Aedes aegypti has been given a lethal gene. The deadly flaw is kept in check in the lab, but the mosquitoes soon die in the wild.'"
It's not a death gene, it is a genetically engineered mosquito that dies, subtle but huge difference. I'd be more concerned with the consequences of killing off a species of mosquito, especially when the one they're targeting isn't the only one carrying the dengue. From TFA:
Phil Lounibous, an insect ecologist at the University of Florida, says getting rid of Aedes aegypti won’t necessarily solve the dengue problem.
“The so-called Asian Tiger mosquito is (also) very abundant all throughout Brazil,” Lounibous says, “and it ... is also a vector of dengue.”
But Oxitec says Aedes aegypti is by far the biggest source of dengue fever, and that reducing its population would be a huge advance for human health.
Classis Big-Corp logic: we can solve this problem (kind of) - so we have to insist that this problem is the one we need to solve in order to solve that other problem (and get paid).
... whatever
Hmmm, I can just imagine how the "death gene" conversation goes.
So, where did you get the gene from?
Ebola.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Even better would be if they could engineer mosquitoes whose *grandchildren* (or great grandchildren) would be sterile, further maximising the damage.
Deal with reality - the world as it is - rather than ideality - the world as you would like it to be.
Just sayin.
Yep. Came here to say the same thing. These mosquitoes are engineered to die. Thus, if they're released into the wild most of them will die but the ones who don't die will survive and pass on these resistant genes to their offspring and bringing a new scourge upon the Earth: Immortal mosquitoes.
At least have a contingency plan: A compulsion to lop each other's heads off with tiny little swords while buzzing, "There can beeee only None!"
I wish I had mod points. You, sir, won the thread.
At least 100 more resources are being used for dengue than for mosquitoes, unfortunately for dengue having "near perfect" protection (the normal situation for all other vaccines) is not only not effective, it actually produces a worse disease. For better or worse controlling dengue is going to take a few more billions and at least one more decade. Also, you control the mosquito and you control several diseases at the same time.
The problem in this case is not so much the danger of the genetic manipulation (the approach seem to be based in minimizing risk) but seen how effective it is really going to be in a large scale situation. People worry much more about this being a waste of money than a danger to the ecology.
Also, the process specifically make the females produced by this males to become sterile so for one part you will get slowly more and more gene-carrier males competing for the healthy females (that will be less and less frequent) in every generation, it will have the extra merit of making the affected females less prone to bite so the risk to humans dimish.
Anyway, the good thing is that this approach affects only a single species of mosquito so even if this goes out of control you have very few risk to the ecology, compared with other much more risky trials (like those done with the Wolbachia parasite in Australia) this seems to be relatively safe.
This is a great idea, and illustrates the benefits of science to help improve the world. Ecosystems around human habitations aren't natural to start with, and we have every right to mess them up for our benefit.
Also from the article:
For his part, Moscamed’s Aldo Malavasi gets impatient with critics from rich countries.
“Dengue is a problem in poor countries, in Latin America, Africa and Asia,” Malavasi says. “I don’t care about Europeans. I don’t care about you gringos. I care to help the people in Africa, Latin America and Asia.”
That is the sort of practical attitude we need to solve the problems of poor countries. Less hand wringing, more action, with adaptive management of any issues that arise.
For what it's worth, I have a bachelor's degree in science with a double major in ecology, and a bachelor's degree in civil engineering. I work as a civil engineer providing water supplies rather than as an ecologist because there's no/hardly any money in science, so I might have a different point of view than more pure scientists. As far as I'm concerned, the reason to care about the environment is because we live in it. We should protect or change the environment as we see fit to benefit the most number of people. That's why we dam rivers, clear land, make farms, build cities, and protect endangered animals; it's all to improve quality of life for humans. Until mosquitoes become endangered, we should kill as many as we can.
I'm a fruit pirate. I bought a watermelon once, and spat the seeds in the back yard. They grew into another watermelon,
Well, as the previous exercise with creating and releasing a new subspecies in Brazil was such a big success, let's repeat it. What could go wrong?
When did the Slashdot audience start to diverge so much from understanding science? The "death-gene" and GM misunderstandings fuelling the discussion here is like reading an intelligent design forum. And you see the same anti-science/science-ignorance tendency in other science-related areas (GM debates in general, climate change, etc.). Is this part of the general anti-science sentiment we see growing in US, or is there a change in Slashdot audience (I've been lurking here forever, and it really wasn't this science-ignorant before).
Humans are the reservoir for dengue in the western hemisphere, so naturally efforts should be focused on elminating this reservoir in the more southern parts of the area before the disease is able to spread to the more important countries north of Mexico.
What could go wrong? I don't know, maybe a disease that kills 22 thousand people? Sorry developing country kids, you gotta die, but hey, at least you don't have to worry about something that might somehow be even worse, like the dangers of unknown consequences, in other words, I don't have an actual argument, but I do have the first world heebie-jeebies, so here's a non-falsifiable appeal to ignorance. Try not to die of hemorrhagic fever while I vacuously muse about precaution from my overpriced organic café. Man, I'm glad you 'What could possibly go wrong' people weren't around when some crazy dude tried fighting disease by injecting people with dead viruses.
I'm not an entomologist, nor an ecologist, but I do recognize the standard MO among genetic engineering opposition, and this looks like the same horse shit type of opposition we see when dealing with genetically engineered crops, so unless someone can give me an actual reason (no, Jurassic Park doesn't count) as to why this is not worth trying, I fail to see the problem with this.
Good idea! Or how about this one - make some that do bite, but the bite leaves a dose of polio vaccine! Or how about the modified mosquitos all get together and deliver milk to starving babies! What is wrong with these "whizzes"? I'm just another buffoon on Slashdot and yet I can come up with a better solution in just two minutes tun these people who have been "studying" the problems and supposedly "understand" it so much more than I do!
By your logic we should have never constructed sewers to control the spread of dysentery and cholera, and instead focused on treating the diseases instead. Or perhaps we should never use condoms and instead spend more money on treating STDs.
Basic management of epidemic disease also includes reducing the vectors that spread the infection and it is MUCH cheaper than treating the disease.
We need to engineer mosquitos that are allergic to humans and which will rather bite each other. That would be a great way to get revenge for thousands of years of human itching and scratching.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Disagree and I can't wait for the blood suckers to be irradiated everywhere!
Yes yes I know, don't mess with a balanced ecosystem.
were made of wood, and had two Merlin engines
A brief primer -- this is a modern twist on the Sterile Insect Technique that has been used since the 1950's to control the Screw-worm fly, and other insect pests.
While the screw-worm's life-cycle was almost tailor-made to work with this technique (females only mate once in a lifetime; large numbers of insects can easily bred in the laboratory; sterilizing doses of radiation do not significantly cripple the males' ability to compete for mates; the males can self-distribute over a wide range), this technique proved to be harder to apply to mosquitoes (else we would have been doing it in the 1950's) -- while a few mosquito species could be controlled with this technique, irradiated Anopheles males suffered from too large a fitness drop to be effective.
Genetic engineering allows us to side-step male fitness problems that occur with radiation sterilization of mosquitoes, and improves the reliability of sterilizing large batches of reliably and efficiently.
Hopefully it doesn't end that bad: Mimic.
That's going to be hard, take one blood source away and still be competitive.
Instead, they could make GM mosquitoes that are unsuitable as carriers for the Dengue virus. You'd still get stung by them, but at least you're less likely to catch crippling diseases.
This isn't Spiderman. You don't gain "death" by being bitten by mosquitoes with a "death gene".
horse shit type of opposition
We call them organic farmers around here, since they'd probably mind being called the way you call them. :-)
Ezekiel 23:20
22 thousand *per year*.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Apart from the ones that go extinct.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
in NE Brazil.
The bloodsucking role is with the female mosquitos. But to reproduce, they need a male... at this point, they supply a gene defective adult male mosquito, in great numbers. If you stop with the supply, the population will restore. But while you are supplying, the population drops a lot.
I prefer this method than the smoke one, which is smelly, uneffective and fuck our swimming pool.
radio lab did a story in the GM Mosquitos a few weeks ago.
http://www.radiolab.org/story/kill-em-all/
1) they only release males (don't bite people)
2) larvae from these mosquitoes require an extra chemical to mature. The adult males live a "full" life fertilizing as many females as possible. The females that mate do in fact lay fertilized eggs and invest their energy in that, but do not know that the final result is failure.
3) mosquitos have a lifespan of a few weeks, so the GM ones all die out very quickly after soaking up the available females of the current generation
4) has been used with great effect in urban areas to eradicate the mosquito population in a less than a dozen generations.
Reversing the "what could possibly go wrong" sentiment, this particular article is noticeably short of the backing science paper for the detail hounds to pore over. The meager analysis presented is too simple - "so if this species dies, another one will just step up the food chain", like maybe that Asian Tiger Mosquito. So then just rinse and repeat a second time. "Kill all the mosquitoes and we win."
Unlike things like the Africanized Killer Bee, which as I understand it was greed gone wrong, there's a life and death upside to winning this attempt, so I'm being careful with my words. So straight up, what *could* possibly go wrong? My best guess is something like knocking a hole in the ecology chain and getting unlucky that we did three rounds, celebrated a couple years of victory, and then discovering that mosquito eating bats are in trouble and then damaging the balance of ecology with whatever eats those or something.
But the snark question is also a fast shorthand for containability risk. Unlike a problem say with a temporary dominance of destructive wolves, making a mistake with insects could be really hard to fix.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
A better parallel would be how the widespread use of insecticides in the US opened up ecological niches to the infamous fire ant, paving the way for the very rapid spread of the species.
then discovering that mosquito eating bats are in trouble and then damaging the balance of ecology with whatever eats those or something.
Yes, there is definitely the butterfly effect that we kindof have to worry about but we've unintentionally (or intentionally) wrecked alot more
havoc on the environment with invasive species, etc... This at least has the potential to save a lot of lives. Personally I wouldn't
really mind if the mosquito went the way of the dodo. I'll take my chances. We obviously know how to breed them in captivity so
if something really bad did happen and we caught it in time then it's possible we could reintroduce them if necessary but other than
just saying "something really bad might happen" I have never heard even a halfway plausible story of how this can actually happen.
There are a few invasive species that have had unintended consequences but they are all pretty managable.
Of course not. You gain the power of death.
...great, but they'd still have to make the non-Dengue mosquitoes win out over the regular 'ol Dengue mosquitoes somehow.
There's no "resistant gene" here.
They're just releasing a bunch of semi-sterile males. They can make babies, but those babies never hatch, and it wastes the reproductive cycles of the female mosquitoes.
We've been doing this regularly since the 1950's. This is nothing new except something for dolts to moan on about Monsanto.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
That would still be fine, as Ebola only killed ~2k people in total, while dengue kills 25k per year.
The question of the viability here is how much of a blood source are humans. If we are an insignificant source, then it's not a big deal.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The AC directly above your comment provides an excellent answer.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Humans are the reservoir for dengue in the western hemisphere, so naturally efforts should be focused on elminating this reservoir in the more southern parts of the area before the disease is able to spread to the more important countries north of Mexico.
Too lat.e You can already get Dengue in Texas!
Your post is a mix of insight and shortsightedness. Yes, undefined FUD is not helpful, but neither is dismissing possible unintended consequences. What happens when it turns out that the Asiatic Tiger mosquito is a more successful vector of dengue, but was kept in check by the Aedes aegypti?
FUD should not be vague, but neither should the contingency planning / risk analysis. "Who cares about the consequences, kids are dying" is not a valid plan of action/
Oh crap!
Or how about a mosquito where only female progeny die. Males are born normally and survive.... leading to a runaway skew in their populations.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
'Unable to have viable offspring' is a gene that's not likely to spread uncontrolled.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Remember, you read that word here first!
But hey why let facts get in the way of doing the exact same thing you are accusing others of, mainly talking out of your ass from your high horse.
and seriously slashdot, +5 insightful? Are only the idiots left?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
based on?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
nothing affects only one species.
Do you not know what happened to these kissing cousins in the states?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Why gm something that already exists? You know how many species of mosquito there are?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Now, you are aware that snippets of dna from the stuff we eat float around inside us right? What could possibly happen to the dragonflys and fish that eat all those tasty larvae?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Actual, this has been going in in other areas with a huge success rate. killing 90+% of mosquitoes in targeted area.
I"m not sure what you problem is with getting rid of a Dengue fever vector.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Thank you.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I heard this episode. They made an interesting point during the show. One reason that the Amazon has survived is the fact that malaria and dengue fever infect people who move into these jungle areas. So the advent of GMOs to control mosquito growth may lead the the clearing of the Amazon. That won't be good.
In fact, my prediction is that the Amazon rain forest will have almost disappeared in a hundred years, largely due to this development.
You post, in short:
"OH LORDY I'M TOO SCARED TO ACTUAL READ THE ARTICLE!"
I mean, come on. Yes, it's important enough that you need important info, but when it's handed to you don't you think you should read it instead of looking foolish?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Since the gene can't be past one, becasue the off spring is dead, it wold make sense t GM people.
I'm not opposed to GMing people* but you can't do it to everyone who is alive.
*I GMed my family through an adventure this weekend! bada-bup
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Except that this does not get rid of the mosquitoes, only one mosquito species - the rest are perfectly fine. This "solution" does not solve the problem, it just shifts which species carry the disease at the cost of unknown damage to an ecosystem - who knows, the locals might be part of that chain somewhere along the line, and you end up killing the same number of people for a different reason. You can't remove an entire section of the food chain and expect nothing to change - best case scenario is that another species of mosquito takes over. As the quoted ecologist says, there is already a species prevalent in the area, that is also a carrier.
... whatever
You post, in short: "OH LORDY I'M TOO SCARED TO ACTUAL READ THE ARTICLE!" I mean, come on. Yes, it's important enough that you need important info, but when it's handed to you don't you think you should read it instead of looking foolish?
This is Slashdot. Who actually reads the article? Besides, my point wasn't that I was scared that something would go terribly wrong with this. I am just saying I've lived in those South American countries and sometimes shortcuts are taken. If what they are doing is safe and reasonably studied, then I think they should do it. The person's post was basically saying that we, in the first world, have no right to judge them for what they do to save lives. I am trying to make the point that every country in the globe is connected. If something does go wrong, it can spread to the first world. And in fact dengue itself has already spread to the United States. So inaction on the parts of these countries could increase the chance of it spreading further into the US. My whole point is that this guy is no better than the people he is deriding. That caution should be displayed when releasing non-native insects (in this case, genetically modified mosquitoes). As long as Brazil and its researchers have done due diligence, then go for it. And no, its really not all that important to me, in the long run. It would likely take generations for any sort of side effect to work its way the thousands of miles to North America - unless the side effect is the eradication of the mosquitoes, then we'd likely do it here.
We could just remember that DDT was only banned because of some whopping big lies that were told and start using it again.
We actually solved this problem decades ago and abandoned the solution. One way to get over the hurdle caused by the big lie is to have all those who still believe the big lie actually live for a decade in the dengue fever and malaria infested areas along with any children they may have and in the same housing as the native populations. They may then figure what is actually important and be less willing to sacrifice a few lives to hinder the chemical industry.
Not to worry. The Amazon rainforest is already dying due to climate change. The additional warmth is drying it out too fast, the jungle is becoming too dry, and so fires are difficult to control. (Used to be they wouldn't spread because everything was so wet.)
So this development won't have any effect on the rainforest. It's too slow.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Actually, there are a few genes roughly like that that do spread. IIRC there's one bug that has contracted a gene that sabotages male offspring. It spreads because it allows unfertilized eggs to hatch into female offspring. So you need to watch the details. (Something similar probably happened to aphids back before we were noticing. Most [all?] aphids are now members of a clone.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It (or things quite similar) has been tested before on small islands with no problems. This isn't proof, but real proof is unlikely to be possible for that kind of question. On small islands it has successfully wiped mosquitoes totally out. This isn't expected to happen in a large country like Brazil, which has land connections to even larger areas. But nothing besides the mosquitoes was damaged on the islands (as far as was noticed).
You can never be really sure, but this strikes me more like the way the US eliminated screwflies than like anything else. I'd be surprised if there were any problems.
As for the "killer bees", IIUC they are becoming less viscious over time, as they inbreed with the local populations. Which causes me to wonder, "Do they suffer from the colony collapse disease?", if not, they may be a net benefit after being a short term disaster.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The real problem is that one can never forsee all possible problems. All decisions are made with a lack of certainty in the results. But when those who pay for the lack of foresight have no control over the descision made, it seems like either reckless abuse of power or worse. And sometimes it is.
If people with the power to make decisions could be trusted to make the best decision, a lot of the second-guessing would go away. Unfortunately, there is a very long track record of people in power making decisions based on benefit to them and costs to them, and ignoring the benefits/costs to everyone else. So there's a certain lack of trust.
To me this decision looks like a good one. I could be wrong. I'm not making it, and I expect to receive neither the benefits nor the costs.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
FWIW, in a few places mosquitoes have been eliminated. It has not been noticed that any problems were caused. Not even for bats and swallows.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The concern is that with A. aegypti gone, the asian tiger mosquito will fill the niche and be as bad or worse since it also carries dengue.
We should always save a backup copy of the existing mosquitoes, just in case we mess up in unexpected ways and want to bring back the past. Even if something is horribly dangerous to humans, but not exterminatingly dangerous to humans, I think there is some right to exist. Like bears for instance. Bears are predators of humans, like mosquitoes are predators of humans. Even if I don't like mosquitoes, or even if I say I hate them, it doesn't mean I can't feel for them, or would agree to having them tortured - I think animal cruelty laws should apply to them too, unless the economics dictates otherwise. I still like bears, but it doesn't mean I want to meet with one in person, without me carrying a weapon, (or at least bear repellent spray, ha ha ha). Instead we should find a way to fend off mosquitoes from humans - spend all our efforts into scent deterrent agents, repellent sprays, so the mosquitoes have to feast on other mammals and reptiles and avians that preexisted before us on the planet. Without genetically engineering them. It's like we have the right to genetically engineer domesticated things, including cows and potatoes, but in the wilderness, the species out there have a right to their genetic identity, and I would only bring in GM as a last resort to keep a species from extinction, but not to drive one into extinction with it. The only things I'd drive to extinction are things like polio, but even that with a backup, as I'm sure there are plenty of backups of polio, anthrax, etc, around the world. You never know, some humanoid alien race might attack us, and our only chance might be unleashing one of these diseases, in case humans have a 35% chance survival, but the aliens only 2%.
http://xkcd.com/1338/
Us + our livestock is just about all there is... Note, this exlcudes birds.
T
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
Why use GM? The goal is to produce sterile males, can't we just irradiate them?
The question of the viability here is how much of a blood source are humans
Some mosquitos have evolved the ability to lay eggs without taking a blood meal. There are some non-biting mosquitos that have evolved.
Mosquitos are parasites.
Like most parasites, they're not a particularly valuable part of the food chain.
Right, because billions of individual bags of almost pure protein exist as an isolated island in the food chain - bats, fish, frogs and toads, to name a few, all feed on mosquitoes.
... whatever
as long as the mosquitoes don't find another source for lysine o.O