Two young people, very close to me, are currently lying in hospital, seriously ill with Dengue fever.

Perhaps  Daniel Engber is correct, in what he says, in his article below.

“It’s time to kill all the mosquitoes,” says Daniel Engber. It was bad enough when these pests were spreading diseases such as malaria and dengue fever around the world, causing the death of hundreds of thousands of people every year. But now they’re also spreading the Zika virus, which is believed to cause birth defects.

Enough is enough. Rather than just seeking to repel these “flying hypodermic needles”, or to control their numbers by spraying cancer-causing pesticides around, let’s go for the “nuclear option” and wipe them out entirely.

For the first time in human history, that option is now in our grasp. By introducing genetically engineered mosquitoes into the wild, it’s quite conceivable that we could totally eliminate at least the handful of really dangerous mosquito breeds, if not all 3,500-odd species. Eco-activists might blanch at such a step, but there’s little evidence that “mosquitoes form a crucial link in any food chain, or that their niche could not be filled by something else”.

When science journalist Janet Fang investigated this option for the journal Nature in 2010, she concluded that “life would continue as before – or even better”. So what’s stopping us? Let’s take on these agents of “bioterror” at their own game. It’s time for mass “mosquito-cide”.

Daniel Engber

Slate.com