Google Mosquitoes
Debugging Florida
I was excited to learn recently that Google has plans to debug Florida and California by releasing millions of “good bugs”—male mosquitos (which can’t bite or spread disease) that “have a naturally-occurring bacteria called Wolbachia which makes them unable to have offspring with wild female mosquitoes.”
It’s an intervention with demonstrable efficacy from past trials, including one in Singapore which reduced dengue spread by up to 77%. (The current proposal targets a different mosquito species—the vector for West Nile Virus—but it’s the same basic mechanism.)
The EPA’s public consultation has so far elicited overwhelmingly negative responses. (I searched the database of 207 comments for the word “support”, but every hit turned out to be someone supporting our local mosquitoes.)
While there’s always a risk of bad side-effects, I’m not currently aware of any evidence to suggest that they outweigh the clear benefits in expectation.1 (Please correct me if I’m wrong!) Many public comments are clearly just expressing status quo bias. Consider the reversal test: If an unexpected natural event drastically cut the mosquito population, how many citizens would be clamoring to release extra fertile mosquitoes in order to restore the population to its prior levels? No-one really believes that the current mosquito population size is objectively optimal. But many are knee-jerk opposed to “human intervention” against what they perceive as “natural”.
Many “natural” infectious diseases are worth combatting with human intervention, and so are the vectors by which these diseases spread. Debugging should only be opposed if our best available evidence suggests that the risks outweigh the benefits. Blind opposition to human intervention is not a good enough reason to condemn more people to preventable illness and disease. If you like, feel free to submit a comment to the EPA saying so—their consultation period closes on June 5.
For example, there’s some concern that Google might mess up and accidentally include some infected females in their release group, who then could reproduce with the infected males and thereby increase rather than decrease the mosquito population going forward. But that would be very embarrassing for Google, so the reputational incentives push against regarding this outcome as very likely.
I am a big fan of these programs! In fact, I would even support the more aggressive GM mosquito programs. I had even been kicking around the idea of writing an applied ethics paper in defense of these programs. One time I had a chance to discuss this issue with our former South Miami mayor Phil Stoddard, who was a biologist at FIU and who studied bugs. He takes environmental issues very seriously and is thoughtful about this stuff. I told him how much I am in favor of these programs, and he was also on board!
It just seems to me that the chance of doing harm is very small (though we should take those small chances seriously), but the potential benefit is ENORMOUS. Dengue and West Nile are bad enough, but we could eventually use these programs in areas to reduce malaria and reduce human suffering in a big way. Seems like a no brainer to me.
In addition to status quo bias, I think a lot of the resistance to the GM mosquito programs comes from a certain type of anti-science bias. You see similar arguments against GMO crops and among the anti-vax crowd. I've been watching this issue closely for years, and I have never been impressed with the arguments against these programs. Thanks for your post!
I just wish they would do something similar for ticks