Tomas Pueyo at Uncharted Territories:
They’re more than an annoyance. They cause over 700M infections and kill ~700k people every year. They’re by very far the most fatal animal to us.
Mosquitoes transmit the Zika virus, West Nile virus, chikungunya virus infections, dengue fever, and most importantly, malaria.
And as we’ve seen in several articles, their destruction has gone way beyond that: Mosquitoes caused slavery, they felled empires, and they created such a burden on people that they pushed them to live in the highlands, where difficult transport and communications made them poorer and more secluded. This prevented wealth accumulation for thousands of years, becoming a major factor in the poverty of tropical regions, especially Africa. Eradicating them would not only revert that, but also reduce the burden on the health system, redirect public-health expenditure to other diseases, reduce absenteeism from schools and work, and stop filling graveyards.
Can we eliminate these diseases completely?
Can we eliminate mosquitoes?
Should we? Would there be side-effects, for example in the environment?
How can you eliminate mosquitoes from your daily life?
That’s what we’re going to cover today.
More here.
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