Posted on 04/28/2008 5:32:57 AM PDT by Red Badger
Environmentalists have condemned a trial plan to deploy millions of genetically modified mosquitoes in Malaysia to fight dengue fever, a report said Sunday.
A mosquito bloated with blood it inserts its stinger into a human's arm. Environmentalists have condemned a trial plan to deploy millions of genetically modified mosquitoes in Malaysia to fight dengue fever, a report said.
Malaysia has expressed concern about the insect-borne scourge after 25 people were killed in the first three months of the year.
The New Sunday Times newspaper said the genetically modified (GM) male mosquitoes will be first freed in Ketam island, a fishing village south of Kuala Lumpur, in an attempt to kill Aedes mosquitoes which spread dengue fever.
Environmental groups, however, oppose the plan.
"Like all GM organisations, once they have been released in the wild, how do you prevent them from interacting with other insects and produce mutants which may be worse than the Aedes mosquito," said Gurmit Singh, chairman of the Center for Environment Technology and Development.
Dengue is endemic to Malaysia, which has seen a rise of 16 percent in cases every year since 2003, according to the government.
Fatalities from dengue in Malaysia reached record levels in 2004, when 102 people died.
Health Minister Liow Tiong Lai said in the first three months of 2008, more than 9,800 cases of the mosquito-borne disease were reported, with 25 people killed.
The field trials for the GM mosquitoes will be undertaken by the Malaysian health ministry and British-based Oxiter Ltd, an insect bio-tech company.
The newspaper said lab trials conducted for the first time in the world during the past one year had produced success, and that field testing would begin by early next year.
The technique involves releasing GM-made Aedes mosquitoes to mate with the female mosquitoes of the same type, it said. The lethal genes from the warrior mosquitoes cause the larvae to die.
Only a female mosquito can transmit dengue fever because it has a proboscis that can pierce the skin.
Wanna see an environmentalist's head explode? Just mention DDT..................
Environmentalists don’t want all people dead. They just want many people dead. People they don’t care about. People who get in their way when they want to take time out from the aircon’d/swimming-pool’d homes and take a nice hike in the woods with their friends.
The rest of humanity? Trash.
To an environmentalist, infecting humanity with a multitude of plagues and diseases is merely taking out the trash.
> To an environmentalist, infecting humanity with a multitude of plagues and diseases is merely taking out the trash.
In this case, Environmentalists are probably right. As New Zealand has found out to its cost, time and time again, when you release a previously-unknown organism into the wild, unpredictable things happen and they are usually things that you will not like.
Nope — on this issue, I side with the Greens.
If ever an idea had the Law of Unintended Consequesences stamped all over it this is A1.
Maybe releasing a GM variant is a bad idea, maybe not. In any case, the “greens” are always against any solution that benefits people, whether it harms critters or not. (Note that caribou congregate around pipelines in the winter for warmth and yet the “greens” still try to make pipelines an issue of “people vs caribou”.)
The “greens” are against DDT. They are against biological solutions to killing mosquitoes. They are against anything that protects the lives of people.
So go ahead, say you are against GM mosquitoes, but I would be wary about saying you side with the Greens. I doubt that you really do.
Environmentalists will oppose anything that contributes to human survival.
> Maybe releasing a GM variant is a bad idea, maybe not.
What we’ve found in NZ is best illustrated by rabbits. Some Englishman 150 years ago decided he wanted a “spot of hunting” available on his farm. So he released a few pairs of rabbits. They have no natural predator in NZ, so they multiplied like, well, like rabbits.
Now there are billions of them. Weasels and stoats were imported to act as predators for the rabbits here. They have no natural predators, and they decided that they much prefer the taste of local New Zealand native animals, which are easier to catch than rabbits.
Now we have two really bad pests taking over. But it gets worse.
Someone had the bright idea to try to kill them en-masse with rabbit-specific diseases. They tried mixamatosis, and then they settled on Rabbit Calici-Virus Disease (RCD).
RCD got released surreptitiously by a farmer in South Island before it had been fully tested and approved. It killed millions and millions of rabbits very quickly. Then the rabbits developed immunities to it. Now there are super-bunnies that cannot be killed by RCD, and there are variants of RCD that may yet mutate and cross over to other animals — we just don’t know.
A similar story could be told about Possums imported from Australia because some Englishman decided that New Zealand needed a Fur Trade. Now there are billions of them and no good way to kill them all.
Or house-cats. They go off into the wild, and after a few generations go feral. No natural predators...
You see, these scientists who come up with all these bright ideas don’t really know what they are doing, or the long-term consequences of their actions: to them, the whole world is one large laboratory, and the experiment is worth doing for the experiment’s sake alone.
GM-modified crops? A brand-new toy for them to play with. They actually have no idea what they are doing, or why, or what the long-term consequences are or could be. And they do not care: they are pointy-headed intellectuals who want to do the experiment anyway.
Science and scientists are thoroughly discredited, even moreso than real estate agents and used car salesmen. Every time they say “science has proven such-and-such” then that is a good clue: wait a year or so, and science will have proven the opposite.
Scientists cannot find their arse with both hands and a flashlight: they aren’t even sure if they have an arse, but they can prove it if you let them try...
So no, I don’t really side with the Greens. But in this case I’d agree with them, that Scientists are not to be trusted with any matters of any importance to our species. Not to be trusted.
Your premise is BS. The Aedes mosquito is ALREADY THERE. All this is doing is introducing more of them with a genetic defect to make less of them. Not the same as rabbits at all.
> Your premise is BS. The Aedes mosquito is ALREADY THERE. All this is doing is introducing more of them with a genetic defect to make less of them. Not the same as rabbits at all.
Gotta disagree, mate. The premise fits perfectly.
The situation is identical to rabbits, mate: thanks to some bright spark 150 years ago, the rabbits are now ALREADY HERE. All the Scientists were doing was introducing a scientifically enhanced RCD to make less of them.
A jolly experiment that went horribly wrong. As usual. Whodathunkit that rabbits can develop immunities and RCD can mutate? That wasn’t part of the original experiment but hey, what an exciting scientific finding, ay.
Like I said, scientists are NOT TO BE TRUSTED. They are like Wile E Coyote: hapless and full of bright ideas that never quite work out as well as hoped. They do not know what they are doing, and they are never held accountable for the damage that they do.
Someone ought to toss a net over every scientist who wants to meddle with anything more complex than his basic chemistry set and slide-rule.
There’s a good reason for the Mad Scientist stereotype: like most stereotypes, it is well-founded in fact. Not all Scientists are Mad, just like not all Scotsmen are thrifty. But enough of each of them are to make the stereotype fit.
Science is a DISCREDITED profession trying to be as respectable as, say, mathematics.
Some Englishman 150 years ago decided he wanted a “spot of hunting” available on his farm. So he released a few pairs of rabbits...I think you've got quite an anti-science thing going on inside your head. Now before you get all angry with me, I admit, you might be right on this mosquito issue.Weasels and stoats were imported to act as predators...[you don't say by who but I suspect not by "scientists"]
RCD got released surreptitiously by a farmer in South Island before it had been fully tested and approved...
A similar story could be told about Possums imported from Australia because some Englishman decided that New Zealand needed a Fur Trade...
Or house-cats. They go off into the wild...
You see, these scientists who come up with all these bright ideas...[scientists??? what scientists!!!]
GM-modified crops? A brand-new toy for them to play with...[Finally, we get to scientists, but really how are GM crops all that different than what farmers have been doing for millenia, breeding new varieties?]
Science and scientists are thoroughly discredited, even moreso than real estate agents and used car salesmen. Every time they say “science has proven such-and-such” then that is a good clue: wait a year or so, and science will have proven the opposite.
Scientists cannot find their arse with both hands and a flashlight: they aren’t even sure if they have an arse, but they can prove it if you let them try...
So no, I don’t really side with the Greens. But in this case I’d agree with them, that Scientists are not to be trusted with any matters of any importance to our species. Not to be trusted.
But I also RESPECTFULLY suggest you look around (at diseases cured, technology developed, advances made in thousands of fields, including agricultural output [which environmentalists predicted would be outstripped by population by the 1980s]) and check your biases.
There's good science, and there's bad science, certainly.
But there's a hell of a lot of good science.
> But I also RESPECTFULLY suggest you look around (at diseases cured, technology developed, advances made in thousands of fields, including agricultural output [which environmentalists predicted would be outstripped by population by the 1980s]) and check your biases.
You are right — I do have some biases and an anti-science thing, and it does possibly taint my world-view somewhat.
You see, there is nothing that is so bad that a scientist can’t make it just a little worse if he does an experiment or two.
This mosquito thing is a great example. How do we know it is a good idea to get rid of all these mosquitoes? On the surface it seems like a fine idea: I hate getting bitten by mosquitoes, and I bet I’d hate having dengue fever even more. And on the surface, dengue fever seems like a bad thing because it kills 150 people per year or something like that. So as experiments go, it seems like a good candidate...
...but I wonder what the local fish will eat when there is no mosquito larvae because these scientists have killed them all off. And I wonder whether more than 150 people per year could possibly die of starvation as a result.
Or perhaps worse, I wonder if the mosquito could mutate — evolution is very clever that way, with mutating — in such a way as you end up with a Dengue-carrying supermosquito that is much more difficult to kill?
I dunno, I’m only wondering. I’m not a scientist and I really would rather not find out the hard way the answers to these niggling questions. Scientists, on the other hand, would be delighted to. It’s a jolly experiment!
That’s why science can’t seem to agree on things like whether cholesterol is good for you or bad for you. Or whether you should or should not eat fat. Or whether an all-vegetarian diet is healthy for you or not.
These are non-trivial questions that scientists are quite happy to pronounce confidently on, then later pronounce the opposite equally confidently. They are immune to the consequences: millions of people will craft their dietary habits around what they say. Entire industries created and destroyed with their each whimsical “scientific” pronouncement. Scientists do not care: off to the next experiment!
Only the weatherman is allowed to be wrong more often than scientists with impunity. If aircraft pilots or ER Nurses were wrong as often as scientists, our gaols would be full of pilots and nurses.
Mark my words: the day will come when scientists will “prove” that nicotine is good for you. It is merely a question of time, and perhaps boredom: some scientist somewhere is bound to prove it.
Do I trust scientists with this mosquito question? Heck no, and for all the above good reasons.
Tell me, are you willing to discard from your life everything you use that came into being as a result of science?? If not, then you're a hypocrite. And you ARE an idiot (and not worth wasting further time on).
> Tell me, are you willing to discard from your life everything you use that came into being as a result of science??
Like most things in life, the answer to that is “it depends”.
I’d prefer to keep the things that science has produced on the odd occasion that Scientists have got it right, and I’d prefer to have the occasions where they’ve got it wrong corrected.
So yes, I’d like to have it both ways: which, when you think about it, is not an unreasonable expectation. We expect our airline pilots to get it right all of the time, and there is usually Hell to pay when they don’t. Same with ER Nurses. Same with dentists. Same with the poor kid who fills your order at McDonalds.
So I’d like to give up the “advances” that Science has made where they have got it horribly wrong, and have those made right. And I’d like to keep those things that they’ve done properly. Exactly like we’d expect of other real professions. The UNDISCREDITED ones.
How’s that for an answer?
You make some excellent points and I’m sure you’re aware of the history of the Africanized bees in the Western Hemisphere and how they came to be here. Somebody (presumably a scientist) wanted to look into the possibility of cross-breeding African bees (which produce a lot of honey) with South American bees (which are more docile).
So what did they do? Did they take some docile bees to Africa and experiment with the cross-breeding there?
No...
The rest is history...
However, on the subject of mosquitoes, dengue fever is bad but malaria is much much worse (in terms of yearly death-toll) and I would definitely want to consider the possibility of getting rid of all mosquitoes if it ended malaria forever.
In fact, I remember reading an article maybe 20 years ago about a “diet pill” for mosquitoes, basically some kind of organic, biodegradable substance that could be sprayed on ponds and other standing water with the effect of inhibiting the uptake of nutrients by mosquito larvae. At the time I read the story it was hailed as a breakthrough, a way to end the scourge of malaria forever.
I never heard anything more about it.
By the way, that photo looks like the one in the beginning of each episode of Dexter.
This is a similar technique to how the screwworm fly was mostly eradicated. In short it works. It doesn’t completely eliminate the problem, but it radically reduces it.
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