It's of note that the project is so unpopular in the Keys that they have had to move from a Keys-wide trial covering thousands of homes to an opt-in only test with 130 houses. In other words, the people who live there don't want to be part of the experiment.
> No one can know the effects of Oxitec’s artificial DNA entering the human bloodstream through mosquito bites
I'm still not sure I understand the problem. This entire experiment feels like a much safer version of the time the USA released a massive amount of DDT to end polio transmission [0]. DDT is obviously horrible for humans, but now we also live in a country without polio. There are costs to everything. Nothing is perfect.
Please provide better evidence than "having non-natural DNA in your blood is bad".
Except that the DDT probably had little to no effect on the transmission of Polio, and the real reason we live in a country without polio is that we've got a vaccine against it.
Right, I didn't add any context in my first comment, but the point is that DDT and mosquito control were an important component of disease control in the United States, regardless of whether polio is relevant to the discussion or not.
I wrote a whole website about this, so I'm not really down to debate it with you. There's a lot to read about this, including source documents from Oxitec and the FDA. You can draw your own conclusions from the evidence that's there.
Not everyone has the time to read "a whole website," nor is everyone inclined to if you are unwilling to clear up a seemingly unscientific concept (DNA from GMO entities ending up in our genome).
Hello from Miami. Sorry but your assessment is just a luddite fallacy. You point out potential harm without acknowledging any potential benefits. It's clear to me that the potential benefits massively outweigh the potential harms.
The potential harms you point out are tiny compared to the millions of lives ruined and hundreds of thousands of deaths caused each year by malaria.
Yes, because of Zika and dengue as other commenters have mentioned.
But that shouldn't really matter. We should fight for a system where obviously-good work can be done even if NIMBYs don't directly benefit from the work. If we're forced into we're forced into talking about how to placate/bribe Florida residents, then we've already lost.
I'm all for reducing the EEE in the Greater Boston Area, too.
There are only four species of mosquito that bite humans. They are a tiny part of the food chain, and would be completely replaced by other food sources.
It's also not the first time humans have successfully made this kind of intervention.
(I believe it was posted to HN a while back, but the article stuck with me as we don't dare enjoy the outdoors here for fear of our child getting Eastern Equine Encephalitis: https://www.cdc.gov/easternequineencephalitis/index.html )
