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Americans love genetically modified mosquitoes much more than other GMOs

A girl puts her hand in a box with male genetically modified mosquitoes REUTERS/Paulo Whitaker

GMOsquitoes

Americans love genetically modified mosquitoes much more than other GMOs

By on Aug 27, 2016Share

When the news started to spread about a plan to release genetically engineered mosquitoes in the Florida Keys, it seemed laughable. The idea was to release hordes of engineered male mosquitoes that would mate with the disease-carrying females and cause them to produce non-viable eggs. The average Facebook post on this was something like: “LOL, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

I don’t see that reaction much anymore. A poll out this week found that 60 percent of Florida residents support tweaking mosquitoes’ genes to fight diseases, while 30 percent opposed. This isn’t statistical noise: Polls are consistently finding that big majorities of Americans support the idea. Conventional wisdom has been flipped on its head. Disdain has morphed into support.

What happened? In a word, Zika. It was the accumulation of those pictures of babies with Zika-related microcephaly, the news that Zika-carrying mosquitoes are buzzing around Miami, and the realization that climate change will usher the disease farther north.

Juan Pedro, who has microcephaly, in Recife, BrazilREUTERS/Paulo Whitaker

This is a perfect demonstration of the way humans, those peculiar creatures, grapple with risk. There’s a principle at work here that helps explain why we reject some things as being too risky and embrace others. We shrug off the suspicion of cellphone radiation but worry about genetically modified foods, even though neither has any demonstrated harm. We fret about nuclear accidents but don’t think twice about people driving cars through our neighborhoods, even though a total of three people have been killed by nuclear power in the United States, while 100 people are killed in car accidents every day.

This can all be explained by what I’ll call, a bit grandly, the self-centeredness principle of risk perception. I’m not condemning this mode of reasoning by using the pejorative term self-centered, just observing that our intuitions about risk are informed by calculations centered on ourselves, not centered on, say, humanity or the planet. The benefits of any change are distributed unevenly and when the benefits are centered mostly on others, or diffused among many, it’s easy for me embrace a scary, sci-fi scenario as a reason for opposition. But if it becomes clear that I stand to benefit, I’ll want to know how likely those scenarios really are; I’ll weigh the pluses and minuses of change.

You can see how this plays out with climate change. The benefits of cutting carbon are diffuse — they go mostly to unborn generations. So if I’m a conservative, predisposed to dismiss climate science, the self-centeredness principle makes it irrational for me to consider the evidence. I’m unlikely to see any meaningful benefit, reading voluminous scientific reports is hard, and changing my mind would make me a villain to my friends.

High-risk technologyREUTERS/Mike Segar

Or take GMOs. Farmers and seed companies reap most of the benefits. The rest of us get lower food prices — but that benefit is spread so thin that most of us haven’t noticed. Therefore the risks don’t have to be probable, or even plausible, for us to balk. You want to put something new in my food that doesn’t directly benefit me? Hells no. You can line up all the scientists, carrying all the authoritative data you want, but again, I have little incentive to read it.

It’s another story when you see the benefits. Mobile phones are so clearly beneficial that people can’t stop using them, even when they really should — like, when accelerating into an intersection. The outrage over the use of genetic modification to make plants for farmers doesn’t extend to the use of genetic modification to make medicines for us.

Follow the GM mosquito story and you can watch American perspectives do a 180 as we begin to see benefits for ourselves. Last year, a survey of people in Key West found that 58 percent opposed using them to control Zika, whereas, the latest poll found that 30 percent of Floridians were opposed. That’s not exactly comparing apples to apples (all Floridians don’t live in Key West) — but it does suggests a shift. The real test will come in November when residents of the Florida Keys vote on releasing the mosquitoes. That vote will tell us if the people of Key West have gone from feeling comfortable in the status quo, where experimenting with a new technology looks like an unacceptable risk, to feeling uncomfortably itchy and ready to consider something new.

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Americans love genetically modified mosquitoes much more than other GMOs

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We’re starting to understand just how Zika and climate change go together

We’re starting to understand just how Zika and climate change go together

By on Aug 4, 2016

Cross-posted from

Climate CentralShare

Athletes and tourists converging on Brazil this week are crowding into a country where rapid environmental change and natural weather fluctuations nurtured a viral epidemic that has gone global.

The Zika virus has exploded throughout South America, up through Mexico and Puerto Rico and into Florida, but the conditions it needed to fester in northern Brazil were rooted in urbanization and poverty. The initial Brazilian outbreak appears to have been aided by a drought driven by El Niño, and by higher temperatures caused by longer-term weather cycles and by rising levels of greenhouse gas pollution.

A truck sprays insecticide near grounds workers at Olympic media accommodations as part of preventative measures against the Zika virus.REUTERS/Chris Helgren

This combination of human and natural forces is emerging as the possible incubator of a disease that’s painfully elusive to detect, despite its cruel effects on unborn children.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an unprecedented domestic travel advisory this week, warning pregnant women to avoid a Miami neighborhood where more than a dozen Zika cases were confirmed.

The warning came six months after the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency “of international concern” in Brazil, where the opening ceremony for the Summer Olympics is scheduled for Friday.

Most Zika infections produce no symptoms, turning their hosts into unwitting harbors for the disease, which is mainly spread through mosquito bites. Unborn children risk microcephaly when their mothers are infected, meaning their heads are small — the result of unusual brain development.

While the effects of El Niño and other weather cycles are beyond the control of humans, the recent spread of the disease into the U.S. is a savage reminder of the heavy toll that humans are taking on their planet — and of the potential for those changes to bite back.

Climate Central research recently showed that warming temperatures have lengthened the mosquito seasons in three quarters of major cities in the United States.

For Americans unaccustomed to fearing tropical diseases at home, the northward march of the outbreak is delivering an exotic threat. Researchers are warning that the disease could reach the halls of power in Washington D.C. and the dense metropolis of New York.

Mosquitoes rely on water to breed and flourish, yet a drought that beset northern Brazil amid a heatwave in 2014 and 2015 — while the disease was stealthily taking root — is thought to have worked in the mosquitoes’ favor.

That’s because households began storing more water, ushering breeding mosquitoes and their larvae inside their homes. Like other developing countries, many in Brazil lack regular access to piped water.

“If you have a drought, you don’t have reliable water access, and that makes you go and get water and store,” said Sadie Ryan, a medical geographer at the University of Florida. “By storing it, you’re creating mosquito habitat.”

Small puddles and ponds of water that accumulate in urbanized areas also tend to favor the lifestyles of the types of mosquitoes that spread Zika, compared with those that tend to thrive in more remote regions. Ryan called these types of mosquitoes “urban capable.”

“In South America up to the ‘70s, there was a really big push for vector control,” Ryan said, referring to efforts to control mosquito populations, such as spraying insecticides. “Then the money went away for it.”

Meanwhile, temperatures have been rising globally because of the polluting effects of fossil fuel-powered industrialization, deforestation and livestock farming, and natural climate cycles have been exacerbating the rate of warming in some places, such as in northern Brazil and California. That’s significant, because mosquitoes can only survive above certain temperatures.

“Once you’re over that minimum temperature, there’s nothing killing the vector,” Ryan said. “There’s nothing slowing it down.”

In a February letter published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, the University of Haifa’s Shlomit Paz and Jan Semenza of the Stockholm Environment Institute and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control reported discovering a “striking overlap” between areas in Brazil that were afflicted by extreme weather linked to El Niño, and areas where Zika was lurking one month later.

More recently, a team of American and Venezuelan scientists took a closer statistical look at the relationship between climate and the Zika outbreak, and reported that El Niño and climate change were not the only important factors — though they were both important.

While the team blamed El Niño for the drought that fueled the Zika outbreak, they concluded that climate change and long-term weather cycles, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which is a long-term cycle in trade winds that influences surface temperatures globally, played important roles in pushing temperatures up to those favored by Zika-carrying mosquitoes.

The findings were hurriedly pre-published without being peer reviewed on the website bioRxiv. That provided health officials and policymakers with rapid information about the findings while the details continue to be reviewed and improved.

Anthony Janetos, a professor of earth and environmental studies at Boston University, who wasn’t involved with the recent study, warned that it does not definitively prove the links that the researchers reported.

Because of that, Janetos criticized the researchers for their choice of headline for the paper, which states that the Zika epidemic was “fueled by climate variations.”

“If they’d been able to show that the same patterns occurred in other outbreak regions, such as Puerto Rico, then their circumstantial case would be stronger,” Janetos said. “But they haven’t done that.”

Ángel Muñoz, a climate scientist with affiliations at Princeton and Columbia universities who led the research, acknowledged Janetos’s criticisms, and he said the headline would be changed prior to final publication.

“This paper is not an answer for a lot of the questions that we have, but it’s an important step,” Muñoz said.

“It’s not possible right now to show a formal link between Zika and climate, because no one has enough data,” Muñoz said. “You need years, not months.”

With models warning that the epidemic will worsen before it begins to improve, the human suffering that’s expected in the months and years to come may help scientists continue to tease apart roles of natural forces in driving the outbreak from those of climate change and other problems caused by humans.

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We’re starting to understand just how Zika and climate change go together

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Thanks, climate change, for all the extra mosquito bites — oh, and the Zika

This bites

Thanks, climate change, for all the extra mosquito bites — oh, and the Zika

By on Jul 28, 2016Share

If rising sea levels, worsening wildfires, and butt sweat weren’t enough to worry about, climate change is also responsible for another problem: more mosquitoes, and more of the diseases they bring with them.

Researchers from Climate Central analyzed the length of mosquito seasons in cities around the country, and what they found is Not Good — at least for humans (the mosquitoes are doing just fine). Improving conditions for mosquitoes, the researchers found, have increased the number of mosquito days in cities like Baltimore and Durham, North Carolina, by nearly 40 per year since the 1980s. More than 20 major cities now have ideal conditions for mosquitoes for at least 200 days each year. That’s over half the year to contend with mosquitoes! Over half! And, nationwide, 76 percent of major cities have seen increases in mosquito season over the past 36 years.

As mosquitoes thrive, so do mosquito-borne viruses like Zika. Already, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed more than 1,400 cases of Zika in travelers returning to the U.S. from abroad. But even if you don’t have plans to travel, that doesn’t mean you’re in the clear: When infected travelers are bit by mosquitoes here, they can then spread the virus at home.

So stock up on mosquito nets, folks. We might all be needing them soon.

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Thanks, climate change, for all the extra mosquito bites — oh, and the Zika

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