We have talking robots, we have self driving cars, we have the best technology that can do almost anything. Why can we not stop mosquitoes from killing tens of thousands each year?

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Why is it so hard to stop mosquitoes? Why can’t we create a solution to kill the diseases mosquitoes carry and distribute them to to the most affected people? I could be super ignorant but it seems like it would be fairly easy if multiple nations came together.

In: Biology

19 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

We nearly did but then people drummed up baseless claims about the pesticides they were using at the time and they stopped, mosquito populations bounced back.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Well robots that regurgitate speech and cars that sort of hold their lanes in perfect weather aren’t exactly the future tech they’re sometimes advertised to be.

Either way, these things are expensive and require significant human and financial resources – something the places that still struggle with malaria usually don’t have.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I believe it’s because male mosquitoes are pollinators, the females only drink blood and spread disease

Anonymous 0 Comments

Mosquitoes are mandatory for population control. Same with a billion other things that can be fixed or improved but we do not.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I think its the money. Malaria and other diseases occur more frequently in poor countries. Pharmaceutical companies know which side the bread is buttered on.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Laser turret fencing (which targets by wingbeat frequency) and genetic modification (to prevent reproduction) are the next big things. So on the one hand we “can”, as in have the tools. On the other hand we can’t because it’s expensive (in these places that don’t have cash, power, or ability to repair nonetheless) and more importantly it’s not exactly a contained issue.

We can’t just protect one village and say we’re making a meaningful difference in the grand scheme of war on malaria. Mosquitos are goddamn EVERYWHERE. Eradication is not a viable option so the breakthrough would basically be *replacing* them with mosquitos engineered to die off if they are carrying diseases, before spreading them.

Anonymous 0 Comments

https://ourworldindata.org/malaria

Malaria deaths are about half what they were twenty years ago. We can stop malaria, we’re in the process of stopping malaria. We just have to pass out enough bed nets.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Mosquitoes are more complex then many people realise. They are not just one species and are in fact made up of about 3500 different species, most of which don’t spread disease. There are probably about 50-100 species that do spread disease in humans. The diseases they spread are different, eg some will spread malaria and others will spread dengue. Although they all do this through the female biting to get to your blood, they have subtlety different behaviours which means things like bed nets will work for some (like anopheles gamibae and not other like aedes albopictus). Added to this you have mosquitoes that show insecticide resistance and disease that are drug resistant.

As other people of have said; on top of this you have poverty and lack of resources in the places where people suffer most from mosquito based diseases.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Let’s start first with… we don’t have truly useful or functional talking robots or self serving cars. Similarly we haven’t mastered the sciences required to prevent or cure malaria either.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Also: evolution. There have been pharmaceutical interventions that take out the mosquitos susceptible to that drug (or pesticide or.. ) and the ones that survive and make more mosquitoes can tolerate that treatment and then it no longer works. And it takes time to develop the next treatment or intervention.