No Truce With Kings

The lawyers will have to wait.

Let’s Kill All the Mosquitoes
Now is the time to wipe the disease-carrying critters off the face of the Earth.

“The level of alarm is extremely high,” said the head of the World Health Organization on Thursday, describing the spread of Zika virus around the world. As well it should be: The disease, which seems likely to be causing birth defects, could affect millions of people in several dozen countries. And the virus may be on its way into the U.S. As of Friday morning, no fewer than five New York residents have been diagnosed as Zika positive. […]

Consider the statistics: Mosquito-borne diseases kill hundreds of thousands of people every year. Malaria alone claims the lives of 6 million people per decade, mostly small children. The economic costs are similarly staggering, likely in the tens of billions of dollars every year. […]

You might’ve thought that news about the Zika outbreak would have convinced humanity to crush the mosquito. But all we keep hearing are proposals to take the battle to the virus, not its host. We’re told that scientists must work hard to find a new vaccine, as if that would be the best solution to the problem. The hunt for a Zika cure could take a decade—and in the meantime we’re left to wait and watch swarms of evil on the wing, mating in midair, and landing on our shores. An enemy has made its way to the nation’s borders. Now is not the time for soft responses.

It’s time to kill all the mosquitoes. It’s time for mass mosquito-cide. […]

As the article mentions later, there are plans for a trial in Florida of genetically modified mosquitoes that will interrupt wild mosquitoes’ breeding cycle. Evidently, the approach has been tried successfully in other locations.

Tell the FDA What You Fear More: Zika, or GMO Mosquitoes?

What are you more afraid of, the Zika virus, or genetically engineered bugs being released in the wild?

If you feel strongly about this issue, you have until midnight Friday to make your opinion known as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration considers whether to approve an effort to kill the disease-carrying mosquitoes by releasing genetically engineered bugs in Florida.

The biotech firm Oxitec plans to release non-biting male mosquitoes that have been modified to produce offspring that don’t survive after mating with wild females. Researchers believe that within a few generations, this should sharply reduce the mosquito population.

Scientists have weighed in on both sides in the nearly 1,300 comments viewable online so far. Fear is also a common theme, but there’s a split over what people find more frightening: genetic engineering, or birth defects linked to Zika. […]

I don’t know what the downsides to wiping out skeeters might be, but offhand it sounds like a great idea. And (as the first article mentioned), it worked for the screwworm fly.

In fact, there was a spooky sci-fi story in the late 70s titled The Screwfly Solution. It was made into an episode of Masters of Horror (a show I’ve never watched).