The Cost of Going Green

[#HBC | Dark Horse]

Recently, I came across in a time magazine this article about malaria. It said (I'll search for the article later) that pesticides used to kill the bugs are illegal. In addition, The location where thy live is illegal to destroy. These two factors are to "keep the earth green" while at the same time hurting the chances of getting rid of malaria.

So this made me wonder, "should we work in the long run or the short run?" The short run would be damaging the environment, but helping humans, while the long run is letting malaria thrive, but helping the environment. Which do you think is right?

 

[rvkevin]

You can still do both. There are more ways to combat malaria than to kill off all of the mosquitoes by pesticide. There's the human aspect of introducing vaccines and nets, or the method of genetically engineering a mosquito that is malaria resistant with a natural advantage and let it breed in the wild.

 

[TheMike]

What he said ^

The short run would be damaging the environment, but helping humans

You would not be completely helping humans if the environment is damaged.

 

[gm jack]

You can still do both. There are more ways to combat malaria than to kill off all of the mosquitoes by pesticide. There's the human aspect of introducing vaccines and nets, or the method of genetically engineering a mosquito that is malaria resistant with a natural advantage and let it breed in the wild.

The vaccines weren't very effective at all (and had to be delivered by getting bitten by mosquitos, a logistical nightmare), the nets are good but people need to move around at some point, and the genetic modification is both not complete and a massively long term strategy, which could potentially fail if the resistance and advantage genes get separated in mitosis.

 

[rvkevin]

(and had to be delivered by getting bitten by mosquitoes, a logistical nightmare)

Explain further, source?

 

[gm jack]

http://www.scienceline.org/2009/06/health-joelving-malaria-vaccine/

They have to get mosquitos infected with the weakened form of the parasite to bite you in order to trigger the immune response. This is limited in that:

1)You have to keep the mosquitoes being fed regularly, even if nobody needs vaccinating. This is a massive problem in distributing the vaccine, as thousands of mosquitoes would need to be shipped all over the world.

2)They can only drink so much blood in a day. You could be sitting there for hours waiting to get bitten.

3)They will die at some point. Then, you have to buy a whole new batch of mosquitoes and so on and so forth. They aren't like other drugs which you can just stockpile in freezer.

4)Add in the malaria parasite's uncanny ability to mutate rapidly and it is unlikely the vaccine could be produced fast enough to eliminate the disease before it spreads again, resetting the situation.