>Somewhere between 438,000 and 720,000 people were killed by the parasite in 2015. Seventy-two percent of those were kids younger than 5,
Sub Saharan Africa has a population of roughly 1 billion people. So this is about 1/2000 of the population that die every year from malaria. If this was happening in the US, say 150,000 people a year were dying from malaria every year, including 100,000 children, do you really think there would be this huge debate about wiping out these malaria species using CRISPR?
Wiping out disease carrying mosquitoes would be one of the best things that could be done for global health. It would disproportionately benefit poor countries in general and children in particular. It is a shame that we as humanity are not making an all out push to eliminate these disease carrying mosquitoes.
Most scientists are attempting to build a public consensus around using gene drives as a public health measure. It might be possible, though, for a single rogue scientist to introduce a self sustaining gene drive that could eliminate malaria, without seeking permission from any people, governments, or organizations.
The content of the article and the title of the article are in contradiction. Like the article mentions this likely would not eliminate malaria. You'd need a reproductive release and at that point nature kicks in with all the unforeseen consequences that entails, including resistance ultimately creating a 'super malaria.' And that really is the fundamental problem. We have a pretty bad track record with genetic engineering stuff. For instance one of the early selling point of genetically engineered crops is that it would mean we could reduce usage of herbicides. Glyphosate in particular is a very powerful herbicide that killed everything except what was engineered to be resistant to it. So get your glyphosate resistant crops, spray just a little bit, and you're set.
And it worked great. Until it didn't. Of course nature kicked in and invasive weeds started evolving natural resistance to the compound leading farmers to pour more and more of the stuff on their crops to try to kill them off - a cycle that continues to this day [1] with no end in sight. Needless to say, our total herbicide usage has skyrocketed from something that was supposed to dramatically reduce it. Citronella, bed nets, and if you're feeling real frisky - the introduction of natural predators seems perhaps more reasonable.
If I remember the procedure better, they radiated thousands of pounds of males so hey were sterile. They evidently only mate once, so it destroyed the population. I don't remember any real dissent discussion. The negatives of getting rid of them were minor compared to the pain and suffering this parasite introduced.
They are much more of what we think of as "tropical disease/parasite". I'd warn anyone looking at more detailed pictures other than wikipedia I linked.
I recall reading about this idea (but not using CRISPR, natch) in New Scientist back in the 1990's.
They covered off the precautionary principle / unintended consequences concern by proposing to retain a breeding stock of the target species in a closed system (say a greenhouse).
You'd be looking at a few years to deplete or render extinct the wild stock, during which time you could be sure the malaria pathogen was absent from your breeding stock.
Once malaria, and the modified mosquitoes, are confirmed absent from the wild, you have the option to re-introduce. Naturally the option also exists at any earlier time if the species turns out to be more important than originally determined.
Given that malaron can actually cure Malaria (and not just prevent it as most people think) by killing the plasmodium directly in the liver, I think all the money for all the projects against malaria would be better invested in creating a dedicated african run factory to make those locally and cheap.
Or planting a lot of Artemisia annua, since both the CNRS and the Gates foundation now recognize this plant is a good alternative.
Ending malaria may take decades. We can prevent millions of people from dying now.
I think you're talking about Malarone. It only gets rid of malaria in the red blood cells. Oftentimes it is prescribed in concert with other medications, like primaquine or something for that reason. In any case, malaria can infect you despite having taken Malarone. It can come back, or even persist, after having taken Malarone.
It's a good treatment, but malaria is a persistent little devil.
Also Malerone is not good on your liver and does not give you 100% protection. I honestly never took my malerone while I travelled in a Malaria risk zone based on the stories I heard about the side effects.
- You'd have to commit to doing that forever. Malaria is ridiculously hard to eradicate without going after the vectors, and you'd have to be providing a continual course of it. You're not talking about "An African run factory to make this cheap" - you're talking about a robust continent wide distribution system. That's not an easy thing to do.
I've run into these kinds of problems all the time thinking about interventions in Africa - a lot of them posit an availability of infrastructure that isn't there.
- The combination of drugs in Malaron slows the development of resistance, but doesn't stop it. What's your plan for drug resistant malaria?
We're already preventing millions of people from dying now. This isn't an all or nothing campaign.
That may well be what ultimately tips the balance, sadly - as climate change extends the range of anopheles and friends, associated tropical diseases including Malaria will start to appear in Europe and the US.
... and for bed bugs, and for fleas, and also for basically every insect that feeds on mammal blood. They are important vectors of transmitting a whole lot of diseases, some of which already dangerous to humans while others could easily mutate to become ones. We are already eradicating a lot of species. May as well exterminate bad ones. There are no ethical problems because no sane person feels bad about killing ticks. These species probably don't have any important ecological role (well maybe they speed up evolution a little bit, but in that case screw evolution). And in case anything goes wrong repopulating the whole globe with them would take no time.
Google shows this article about eradication of malaria in Corsica after WWII: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2927611/ . The mosquito population was suppressed by draining marshes and by spraying breeding grounds with insecticides such as DDT. If you disrupt the mosquito population for a few years, the malaria parasite will die out since it needs to be transmitted to humans or other animals as part of its life cycle.
Basically to get rid of it you have to kill the mosquitos or stop the people getting infected. That is hard with large jungle areas and tribal people who don't go see the doctor. In most places where people go to the doctor it does get wiped out. Eventually as Africa gets richer and people have modern facilities it would probably get sorted anyway but that may be a while. Things can go backwards too. In Venezuela it was mostly gone but has come back with the economic collapse.
There was malaria in Sweden and it was relatively common 250 years ago, especially in the archipelagos around Stockholm.
The climate is probably not the best for the parasite, but there was a number of changes that more or less unintentionally helped erradicate the disease.
First, there were enormous projects to improve farming. Basically all lakes became regulated and most wetlands were dried out to gain farmland. Before that there was a long period of improvements of living standards and hygiene - as simple as separate and better houses for the people rather than sharing a single house with the kettle. Glass windows got affordable for basically everyone, etc.
There are still mosquitos, including those that may transmit malaria, but the breeding opportunities and contamination paths got reduced below a critical level for the parasite.
I suspect that having cold winters helps, but I guess that the situation in Africa could be improved too with better houses and better control of potential breeding areas. It took a couple of hundred years in Sweden though..
I'm unclear how the modified mosquitoes replicate and spread if the genetic alteration sterilizes them. Do you just have to continue releasing the GMO versions, or is it not entirely effective, or what am I missing?
There were two different kind of mosquitos mentioned in the article.
The one you are talking about are sterile males. All they do is compete with the unmodified wild males, and can depress the population. As the mutation isn't passed onto any future generations, new males have to be continuously released. I remember reading somewhere else that this is already done in some places ( but I can't remember where I read it, so don't quote me on that ).
The other kind mentioned in the article are non-sterile mosquitoes designed with a trait, and paired with another set of genes that cause almost all offspring to carry the same traits. I think the article mentioned around 95% of the first generation would carry the change.
Pair that with a trait that causes more children to be male then female, and the population could be suppressed by only releasing one batch of altered males.
To me it sounds like a really good idea, but as mentioned in the article, once released there wouldn't be any way to really control where it spread.
We humans don't really have a very good track record of dealing with the things Nature throws at us as can be seen with countless examples invasive species (imported to solve some problem or other) wrecking havoc on native species, super-germs &etc.
I seem to recall reading that mosquitos are a staple food source for birds or bats or something, what could possibly go wrong with killing them all off?
Humans have a natural immunity to malaria but nobody is saying we need to genetically modify everyone to have sickle cell anemia.
Another way to eliminate malaria is to modify it so that it kills the host, eventually eliminating the ability of malaria to replicate and go to extinction. I am not seriously suggesting this, but this is how nature works. There are unknown diseases in the past that have extincted themselves this way.
I can't speak with authority on many subjects, but as it happens, medicine is one that I maintained a deep familiarity with in a past life. (Medical and bio tech startups.)
There are over 200 surprisingly different species of Malaria. Humans are affected by five or six of them if I'm remembering everything correctly. Here is the thing, the number of species of birds, bats, antelope, monkeys, etc affected by those malaria strains is legion. So here's your problem in extremely simplified layman's terms, how do you make malaria kill ALL of its potential hosts? Then there is the question of Anopheles. Will your modifications kill that species as well? How do you stop the other 194 or 195 species of malaria from mutating to affect humans? Etc etc etc.
Continuing with overly simplified explanations, malaria has learned to "survive" over the past few million years. There are many parasites out there and I'd argue that malaria is far and away among the most savagely cunning in this respect.
What you propose is akin to the jedi handwave-y manner that people propose we "cure" cancer. It really is just not as simple as that. Historically, people have always found themselves to be "really, really, really close"...
Thats not how nature works. Diseases typically become less deadly over time since introduction to a new host; strains that terminate their host are less viable than ones that keep a long lived infectious one.
A mosquito that out competes other mosquitos while living a short hyperactive life is a better way to eliminate malaria by not giving it a necessary gestation period. Areas where a mosquito's life is short do not have malaria.
Diseases often die out because they run out of their food source .. same with some animals/predators. That's probably why so much of the bacterial around us has evolved to live symbiotically with the plants and animals around them.
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|7 years ago|reply
Sub Saharan Africa has a population of roughly 1 billion people. So this is about 1/2000 of the population that die every year from malaria. If this was happening in the US, say 150,000 people a year were dying from malaria every year, including 100,000 children, do you really think there would be this huge debate about wiping out these malaria species using CRISPR?
Wiping out disease carrying mosquitoes would be one of the best things that could be done for global health. It would disproportionately benefit poor countries in general and children in particular. It is a shame that we as humanity are not making an all out push to eliminate these disease carrying mosquitoes.
[+] [-] scarmig|7 years ago|reply
Most scientists are attempting to build a public consensus around using gene drives as a public health measure. It might be possible, though, for a single rogue scientist to introduce a self sustaining gene drive that could eliminate malaria, without seeking permission from any people, governments, or organizations.
If you could do it, would you?
[+] [-] TangoTrotFox|7 years ago|reply
And it worked great. Until it didn't. Of course nature kicked in and invasive weeds started evolving natural resistance to the compound leading farmers to pour more and more of the stuff on their crops to try to kill them off - a cycle that continues to this day [1] with no end in sight. Needless to say, our total herbicide usage has skyrocketed from something that was supposed to dramatically reduce it. Citronella, bed nets, and if you're feeling real frisky - the introduction of natural predators seems perhaps more reasonable.
[1] - https://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12302-0...
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] crankylinuxuser|7 years ago|reply
If I remember the procedure better, they radiated thousands of pounds of males so hey were sterile. They evidently only mate once, so it destroyed the population. I don't remember any real dissent discussion. The negatives of getting rid of them were minor compared to the pain and suffering this parasite introduced.
They are much more of what we think of as "tropical disease/parasite". I'd warn anyone looking at more detailed pictures other than wikipedia I linked.
[+] [-] Jedd|7 years ago|reply
They covered off the precautionary principle / unintended consequences concern by proposing to retain a breeding stock of the target species in a closed system (say a greenhouse).
You'd be looking at a few years to deplete or render extinct the wild stock, during which time you could be sure the malaria pathogen was absent from your breeding stock.
Once malaria, and the modified mosquitoes, are confirmed absent from the wild, you have the option to re-introduce. Naturally the option also exists at any earlier time if the species turns out to be more important than originally determined.
[+] [-] sametmax|7 years ago|reply
Or planting a lot of Artemisia annua, since both the CNRS and the Gates foundation now recognize this plant is a good alternative.
Ending malaria may take decades. We can prevent millions of people from dying now.
[+] [-] bilbo0s|7 years ago|reply
It's a good treatment, but malaria is a persistent little devil.
[+] [-] tzumby|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fomite|7 years ago|reply
- You'd have to commit to doing that forever. Malaria is ridiculously hard to eradicate without going after the vectors, and you'd have to be providing a continual course of it. You're not talking about "An African run factory to make this cheap" - you're talking about a robust continent wide distribution system. That's not an easy thing to do.
I've run into these kinds of problems all the time thinking about interventions in Africa - a lot of them posit an availability of infrastructure that isn't there.
- The combination of drugs in Malaron slows the development of resistance, but doesn't stop it. What's your plan for drug resistant malaria?
We're already preventing millions of people from dying now. This isn't an all or nothing campaign.
[+] [-] api|7 years ago|reply
There probably wouldn't be a debate if malaria were a big problem here.
[+] [-] madaxe_again|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dowwie|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HumanHater|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jvandonsel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] craftyguy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] org3432|7 years ago|reply
"I don't look at it [nature] as this morally benevolent place, it's a horror show"
[+] [-] raphinou|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vilhelm_s|7 years ago|reply
The same thing was done in the U.S., where malaria used to be endemic until the 20th century. http://dcmosquitosquad.com/history-of-malaria-in-the-usa/
[+] [-] tim333|7 years ago|reply
Basically to get rid of it you have to kill the mosquitos or stop the people getting infected. That is hard with large jungle areas and tribal people who don't go see the doctor. In most places where people go to the doctor it does get wiped out. Eventually as Africa gets richer and people have modern facilities it would probably get sorted anyway but that may be a while. Things can go backwards too. In Venezuela it was mostly gone but has come back with the economic collapse.
[+] [-] kpil|7 years ago|reply
The climate is probably not the best for the parasite, but there was a number of changes that more or less unintentionally helped erradicate the disease.
First, there were enormous projects to improve farming. Basically all lakes became regulated and most wetlands were dried out to gain farmland. Before that there was a long period of improvements of living standards and hygiene - as simple as separate and better houses for the people rather than sharing a single house with the kettle. Glass windows got affordable for basically everyone, etc.
There are still mosquitos, including those that may transmit malaria, but the breeding opportunities and contamination paths got reduced below a critical level for the parasite.
I suspect that having cold winters helps, but I guess that the situation in Africa could be improved too with better houses and better control of potential breeding areas. It took a couple of hundred years in Sweden though..
[+] [-] murbard2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tgb|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sxates|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dan353hehe|7 years ago|reply
The one you are talking about are sterile males. All they do is compete with the unmodified wild males, and can depress the population. As the mutation isn't passed onto any future generations, new males have to be continuously released. I remember reading somewhere else that this is already done in some places ( but I can't remember where I read it, so don't quote me on that ).
The other kind mentioned in the article are non-sterile mosquitoes designed with a trait, and paired with another set of genes that cause almost all offspring to carry the same traits. I think the article mentioned around 95% of the first generation would carry the change.
Pair that with a trait that causes more children to be male then female, and the population could be suppressed by only releasing one batch of altered males.
To me it sounds like a really good idea, but as mentioned in the article, once released there wouldn't be any way to really control where it spread.
[+] [-] petters|7 years ago|reply
I can not understand this comment. How is 438,000 annual deaths not an emergency!? We DO absolutely need to do it!
[+] [-] UncleEntity|7 years ago|reply
We humans don't really have a very good track record of dealing with the things Nature throws at us as can be seen with countless examples invasive species (imported to solve some problem or other) wrecking havoc on native species, super-germs &etc.
I seem to recall reading that mosquitos are a staple food source for birds or bats or something, what could possibly go wrong with killing them all off?
Humans have a natural immunity to malaria but nobody is saying we need to genetically modify everyone to have sickle cell anemia.
[+] [-] adictator|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] delbel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bilbo0s|7 years ago|reply
I can't speak with authority on many subjects, but as it happens, medicine is one that I maintained a deep familiarity with in a past life. (Medical and bio tech startups.)
There are over 200 surprisingly different species of Malaria. Humans are affected by five or six of them if I'm remembering everything correctly. Here is the thing, the number of species of birds, bats, antelope, monkeys, etc affected by those malaria strains is legion. So here's your problem in extremely simplified layman's terms, how do you make malaria kill ALL of its potential hosts? Then there is the question of Anopheles. Will your modifications kill that species as well? How do you stop the other 194 or 195 species of malaria from mutating to affect humans? Etc etc etc.
Continuing with overly simplified explanations, malaria has learned to "survive" over the past few million years. There are many parasites out there and I'd argue that malaria is far and away among the most savagely cunning in this respect.
What you propose is akin to the jedi handwave-y manner that people propose we "cure" cancer. It really is just not as simple as that. Historically, people have always found themselves to be "really, really, really close"...
and that last 1% never materializes.
[+] [-] yayana|7 years ago|reply
A mosquito that out competes other mosquitos while living a short hyperactive life is a better way to eliminate malaria by not giving it a necessary gestation period. Areas where a mosquito's life is short do not have malaria.
[+] [-] djsumdog|7 years ago|reply