Gene drive modified mosquitoes offer new tool for malaria elimination efforts

Not the prettiest thing in the world, but:

Get a cheap box fan, cheap mosquito netting type material, and duct-tape.

Cut the netting to size and tape it to the fan so that anything that goes through the fan gets caught in the net.

Put it in shaded places - bonus if its around doors.

Mosquitoes are not strong flyers, and when hunting or looking for a place to rest will get sucked in and can't get out.

I've killed - without exaggeration - thousands doing this.

Not a silver bullet (what is?) but as part of a defense-in-depth strategy this is insanely easy - and kind of fun.

n.b. I've been hospitalized with west nile - this is fun :-)

There are pest control companies that will fog your property which supposedly reduces the mosquito population. I'm skeptical though that me paying for the service will make a difference unless all of my neighbors do as well.

I can't find it now, but I remember reading about a person that used a box fan, some type of mesh fabric, and dry ice to create an insect trap that was apparently catching pounds of bugs every week.

I have some friends who live in the Houston suburbs. They bought one of the CO2-based mosquito traps. Seemed to work.

Although it's absolute hell on plastics, DEET is incredibly effective as a mosquito repellent. At least in the US, you can buy 99%+ pure DEET at Home Depot.

This is one topic that Florida man knows better than most: a propane powered fogger was super effective when I was growing up in Florida. They would also do this as a public service where trucks operated by the county would drive by and fog entire neighborhoods. I don't know how ecologically sound this is but it is effective.

We've had good luck with Mosquito Dunks, both in natural standing water sources and in dedicated "trap buckets" filled with water and vegetation, but you have to do it early in the season as the dunks only affect the larvae.

Last year I came across a water-filled stump that was teeming with larvae swimming around in it. Dropped a piece of a dunk in, came back 24 hours later and the water was clear.

Mosquito nets are best: put some as canopies above beds and enjoy sleeping without the dreaded ear buzz. If you live in a badly infested area, put them around doors / windows (there's retractable ones, you can fit them yourself). And finally, the superpower of just doing things: do some door to door / enlist your neighbors and hunt down the neighborhood stagnant waters.

I have had better results with Picaridin based repellents than with DEET. Picaridin does not have the same oily feel that leaves my skin crawling after repeated applications. It also seems to do a better job dissuading our local variety of horse flies which will bite you right through clothing.

I find that having a fan working in the room helps a lot. It's not foolproof, but it helps in certain situations.

This idea is much more than 8 years old. If my memory serves, achieving this via gene drive was first proposed in the 1980s, by using "transposable elements". If you'd like to learn more check out the following, only 25 years old (I think it cites the earlier work):

James, A. and Handler, A., editors (2000). Insect Transgenesis: Methods and Applications. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL. ISBN: 0849320283

Creating the right effector gene, and attaching it to a transposable element (or some other gene drive system) as the Imperial researchers and colleagues have apparently done is only one part of the battle. Getting this to spread in nature from introductions of mass-reared mosquitoes.. well that will be a big challenge also. To say nothing of the permitting as you mention.

The press release is remarkably devoid of any technical information on what they have accomplished.

> and the mosquito could become the friend of humanity

i'd rather not have them suck my blood even if there is no disease risk

> and the mosquito could become the friend of humanity.

This is impossible.

One night in the northwoods of Minnesota will quickly and completely disabuse you of this fantastical notion. I would make all mosquitoes extinct at great personal cost, if there was a way to do it. Being disease vectors doesn't even have much to do with it. They are the most profoundly irritating bug, with zero redeeming qualities. They make large swathes of country difficult to exist in during dawn and dusk. I cannot express in words the depths of my hate for mosquitoes.

I take it you have never spent any time outside where there's lots of them. If you go out without protection, they'll mercilessly sting every bit of exposed skin. Depending on your genes and the mosquitoes', the stings can swell heavily. Some of them sting so deep that you cannot get rid of the itching and inflammation with a heat pen.

As soon as you stand still, you'll find yourself in thick cloud of the bastards within 20 seconds. If you use repellent (picaridine does work to keep them from stining but isn't exactly healthy), they will still buzz around you and slowly drive you mad. If you use netting, some get through the inevitable gaps and some will obviously get inside your tent/car/house when you open them.

The sound of thousands of them flying around you just triggers some primal revulsion. Around sundown, their activity gets so intense that it literally sounds like a drone, if they're a large variety it even sounds a bit like a distant hornet swarm.

All in all, I don't think we can become friends. But at least they're more pleasant than black flies and deer flies.

I think the problem is that the protein is an anti-coagulant, which is necessary for mosquito's feeding strategy but is also something you probably want your body to have a pretty robust reaction to and break down/expel pretty aggressively, lest each bite just keep bleeding well after the mosquito finishes feeding.

Would for sure be nice if the immune response could skip the itching part though.

> Mosquitoes are ecologically important pollinators

Source? Because the research I’ve seen for disease-causing mosquitoes says nope [1].

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/466432a

This is nonsense perpetuated by wanna be naturalists. Disease carrying mosquitos could just cease to exist and we will be fine. This topic has been discussed countlessly even here.

I just looked it up. The process involves modifying a fertilized egg or embryo to create a founder organism. The gene drive is designed to be inherited by more than 50% of the organism’s offspring and propagate through the population over successive generations. Because humans have fewer offspring and longer generation times compared to insects, it would take many generations and potentially hundreds of years for a gene drive introduced in a single human to spread widely through the population.

But mosquitoes are super annoying, and the probably don't even know how to make nuclear bombs. I mean, lots of humans are annoying too, but not all of them. Every single mosquito is annoying, and they can't stop us, so, uhh.. let's do it.