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.
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.
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.
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.
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