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Comment by duskwuff | Hacker News Reader

The sheer amount of human and animal* suffering caused by mosquito-borne diseases speaks strongly in favor of mosquito eradication. Over half a million people died of malaria in 2022 alone, over three quarters of them children - even if there are ecological risks, they need to be weighed against allowing that suffering to continue.

*: e.g. heartworm in dogs

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It's crazy that eradicating missiles would do way better. It could even fund vaccination against mosquito-borne diseases without /figuring/ around and finding out if the chain reaction started by killing all the mosquitoes has big consequences or not.

why are you bringing this up? It's irrelevant to the topic at hand

I agree it's sort of unrelated, but I think that people are getting nerd-snipped into thinking/discussing about a complicated improvement while there's easier ones right in front of us and it's kind of sad that while easy on theory, everyone seems already defeated by our apparent inability to do something about it.

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I guess the political turn is what seems it be off place, but if people were discussing how to make a program 0.5µs faster it'd be ok to discuss a way to shave 3s out of it, even if it was a completely different approach on a different part of the program. It'd mean that the effort is maybe being made in the wrong place.

only Malaria has killed far more people than missiles you brought up. According to estimates published in Nature, over 50 billion people have suffered from Malaria over the course of human history. (Whitfield, J. Portrait of a serial killer. Nature 2002) that nearly half of humanity lost to a single disease.

and unfortunately we are in warming planet where Malaria's host vector range is going to increase as temperatures continue to rise, destroying Malaria is one of the greatest possible morale goods we could pursue.

> over 50 billion people have suffered from Malaria over the course of human history.

Those are long dead already, aren't they? I guess the right question to be asked when thinking about taking action is which one is going to kill more in the near future.

> unfortunately we are in warming planet where Malaria's host vector range is going to increase as temperatures continue to rise.

This is a fair point and should be accounted when thinking about the impact on malaria

> Destroying Malaria is one of the greatest possible morale goods we could pursue

It's great for sure, maybe among the greatest ones around health, but I don't think it'd go over peace.

its his/her job?

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