And now we've arrived at the debate behind the Third Edition of Webster's Dictionary. Are dictionaries to be a record of historic usage, or current usage? The Third Edition leaned completely in the direction of the the latter, and caused a lot of controversy in the dictionary world. I tend to lean towards the former view on how dictionaries should function, or else we'll lose all ability to understand historic texts as definitions drift over time.
The poignant example being "acquire", which historically implied "getting by one's own efforts" but has drifted to be used more passively now.
I don't know what is usually used, but I do know that it is correct to say that you acquire diseases that you aren't born with, like malaria. So, yes, one does certainly acquire STDs. It depends with cancer. Some cancers are inherited, some are acquired.
Yes, you can also acquire a car, but I'm not sure why that might lead one to think that "acquired malaria" is incorrect...
I'm not sure how "to gain" excludes gaining a disease. In any case, as I've alluded to before, other uses of acquire don't make the definition of developing a disease you weren't born with any less legitimate. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yes. The word "contract" would be ambiguous between the people being infected with malaria in the US or them developing symptoms in the US after having been first infected while abroad. Using "acquire" doesn't present that ambiguity.
When a company contracts another company, the latter will eventually go away after it's dealt with, but when a company is acquired, it will stay forever.
Ac*quire" (?), v. t. [imp. & p. p. Acquired (?); p. pr. & vb. n. Acquiring (?).] [L. acquirere, acquisitum; ad + quarere to seek for. In OE. was a verb aqueren, fr. the same, through OF. aquerre. See Quest..] To gain, usually by one's own exertions; to get as one's own; as, to acquire a title, riches, knowledge, skill, good or bad habits.
"usually by one's own exertions" does not fit contracting a disease or being infected.
> "usually by one's own exertions" does not fit contracting a disease or being infected.
In professional settings, terms get chosen for ability to reliably convey specific scenarios. I suspect that ability better determines their adoption, rather than how they might align with language norms of a particular decade.
(I just checked and no immediate hits for "malaria virus sample" on eBay so probably not, hope I don't get a visit from the good people at Border Force for this. :P )
I'm not wasting time. I posted the definition I am familiar with elsewhere in the thread. Typically, "acquired" implies getting by one's own effort, which doesn't apply to an infection with disease.
>Although about 2,000 people infected with malaria turn up in the US health care system every year, those cases are all linked to travel outside the US. Neither those involved in the Florida cases nor the Texas case had traveled. That means in both states, the infection was acquired within US borders.
Just as a reminder, in 2021 there were close to 250 million estimated malaria cases worldwide, with an estimated ~600.000 deaths according to WHO, so it is very much a concern for the world even though it was eradicated in the USA
The CDC reports that, previously, the last case of malaria to be "locally acquired" in the US was 2003. [0] See also [1] for a history of the effort to eliminate malaria in the US, which took place primarily from 1947 - 1952.
My wife's phd research 10 years ago was confirming those original warnings. Literally - confirming the change in habitat range for Aedes Aegypti and Anopheles Darlingi (mosquitos, also a malaria/yellow fever/dengue/zika vector) across both south/central America and the southern US in response to changing climate.
It's absolutely coming back to the US. Mosquitos are moving north to stay in their optimal temperature range as the climate warms.
edit: My wife saw my comment and got annoyed that I listed the wrong subspecies. Updated to include Anopheles Darlingi.
My understanding of malaria and its spread is essentially the winters are cold in the states and kill off all mosquitos in the winter. The larva (or whatever the correct term is) don’t carry malaria, so the mosquitos must grab it from an infected animal.
So the warmer the states get, the warmer the land south of the states get. More and more mosquitos survive winters closer to the states, and so smaller travel distance.
But based on what you just said it seems that understanding is not actually how it works?
I didn't do the research and am not the expert, but essentially:
Temperature impacts mosquitos in several ways that change their effectiveness as a vector for disease.
The temperature during egg/pupa/larva stages impacts adult body size and fitness of the mosquito. That in turn tends to impact total lifespan.
A change as small as 2 to 4 degrees C can add or remove more than a week of lifespan for a mosquito (huge change, the average lifespan is 10-14 days), and the longer a mosquito is alive, the more likely it is to become a vector for malaria (and other diseases). For malaria in particular - the life cycle of the disease means the mosquito usually needs to make it at least 10 days to become a vector.
Throw on top that changes in temperature can change the feeding habits (shift them in time to make mosquitos more likely to feed when humans are out) and that parts of the southern US are now considered viable habitat for these subspecies and you get Malaria.
They do still need to interact with an animal/person carrying malaria during their adult stages - and the general strategy in the US is still to contain and treat those carriers.
We just expect it to get much more expensive as these mosquitos become more fit for our region.
Can we use bats or nematodes to fight this return?
I spray my lawn with beneficial nematodes. I saw some small decline in the number of mosquitoes born in my yard but it doesn't stop mosquitoes from surrounding areas. My next move is to install a bat house on my house.
> Rabid dogs are responsible for the deaths of an estimated 25,000 people per year. In countries where dogs commonly carry rabies they are involved in up to 99% of infections, according to the WHO. Countries with large numbers of stray dogs, including India, are the worst affected. According to the WHO, about 36% of the world's rabies deaths - 20,000 of about 55,000 deaths worldwide - occur in India each year, most of those when children come into contact with infected dogs.
> Dying from an actual dog bite is much more rare. There is no reliable worldwide data, but of the estimated 4.5 million dog bites in the US every year, only about 30 people die on average.
Is it the blood loss, or the stopping of the heart?
Is it the stopping of the heart, or oxygen starvation of the brain?
Is it the oxygen starvation of the brain, or the chemical breakdown therein?
Is it the chemical breakdown of the brain, or the resulting changed perception of others causing them to ascribe the very human and sometimes subjective label “dead” to the subject of the bear’s attentions?
Must be our ancestors fault. They did a good job at contributing to the extinction of many megafauna (in addition to Paleocene climate changes), but didn’t quite get all the bears. How lazy of them.
Though fun-fact: California used to have an endemic subspecies of Grizzly bear that was entirely wiped out by the European settlers. I can’t really fault them for this... times were tough back then. Some Grizzly Bears have re-enter California from the north in more recent times.
Makes me realize that in certain contexts ecological preservation is a privilege. If there’s a 2% chance a Grizzly is going to kill my darling child Timmy, I’m okay with wiping them out and worrying about the ramifications later. I’m not going to risk little Timmy being eaten to preserve some amorphous concept of natural balance. Fortunately we don’t live in that world any longer. (And >0.05% risk of Timmy being eaten is acceptable to me, since this is on par with many other risks)
Sober, but I love tonic water that was called quinine tonic water when I was younger, but nowadays tonic water usually has little if any quinine, and citrus and high fructose corn syrup and/or sugar.
"Per FDA ruling, tonic water can contain only 83 milligrams of quinine per liter. The typical medicinal dosage of quinine is around 500 milligrams, and in the case of malaria, it is taken multiple times a day"
I lived in SE Asia for over 7 years with close to 2 years of living in remote areas with dengue and malaria. I drank my Schweppes tonic water because I am sober and enjoy the bitterness, and it gave me some peace of mind that I was keeping quinine in my system at any level.
Having cobra anti-venom was a lot more important where the nearest trauma center could be 12 hours away by vehicle due to winding, mountainous, and difficult roads before hitting a real paved road.
When I was growing up my father had a couple of cans of insect repellent that contained DDT. He kept them in the freezer so they'd last longer. He honestly thought it was the good stuff and opposed the ban. I remember seeing them in 1975, they were Olive Drab Green cans, so probably Army Surplus.
Tough to say. Not all countries have total bans on DDT, and even the Stockholm Convention exempted vector control from the ban on certain organochlorine compounds. In any case, DDT-resistant mosquitoes were already starting to occur in the 1960s due to the unrestricted spraying. Spraying has mostly continued as indoor residual spraying, which still seems to be quite effective.
> sure this has absolutely nothing to do the hundreds of million of genetically modified mosquitos that were released into Florida by the Bill gates funded biotech firm Oxitec
It does, as in they both have a common cause: rising temperatures making the United States more habitable for malaria.
Since we're down here in the bottom most flagged comment, what I like to call "Hacker News Conspiracy Theorist Edition", I think OP's conspiracy theory works like this. It's similar to the Wuhan lab.
1. Say you are running a mosquito breeding factory to help humanity.
2. Import mosquitos from subsaharan africa
3. Say you checked every mosquito for Malaria.
4. Pay a subcontractor a lot of money to not do this, but make it look like a mistake or lazyness or incompetence or a mixup.
5. Deny everything when asked. Deny when whistleblower leaks information. Say it was a mistake and an oversight when physical proof of malaria mosquitos are discovered in your facility and that you've been breeding them. Mysterious bad things happen to subcontractor who are likely whistleblowers.
6. 80% of the population will believe you unconditionally and flag anyone on HN who dares not believe you.
That's not how mosquito breeding works. #3 would be an absurdly insane assertion, and unnecessary; malaria is transported by adult female mosquitos from one infected human to another human.
These programs release male mosquito eggs from many-generations-old captive populations, which is not how malaria spreads.
There will no doubt be a big whoops like when the SV40 cancer causing virus contaminated the polio vaccine. The more plausible the mistake, the more excellent the opportunity for malice of bad actors, because of the overwhelming bias of most people to believe that others act in good faith.
If that's the worst example you can come up with of "big whoops" and "no doubt [will happen]" - 70 years old and no actual cancer cases, with the advent of PCR fixing the root issue - I think we're probably gonna be OK.
> Population level studies show no evidence of any increase in cancer incidence as a result of exposure, though SV40 has been extensively studied. A thirty-five year followup found no excess of the cancers commonly associated with SV40.
The worst example was the Rockefeller foundation sterilizing people on Kenya with tetanus shots that was making their immune system attack HCG. That this incident is well known in Africa contributed to the very low uptake of covid vaccination there.
> Basically, the theory is that a hormone blocker that would cause infertility had been surreptitiously added to tetanus vaccines. This claim, like many long-standing conspiracy theories, is based on a grain of truth. Researchers had developed a combination contraceptive and tetanus vaccine that was tested in the early 1990s and was designed to prevent pregnancies temporarily (it did not have a permanent effect on fertility). But hormone blockers have never been used in tetanus vaccines available to the public; they’ve only been used in research.
The Kenyan Catholic Doctors Association did their own tests on Tetanus vaccines actually delivered to Kenya and found they created antibodies to HCG. Thus, people can deny that that was ever the intent or they intended to sterilize people, but an empirical examination of the actual vaccine given to the actual people in Kenya shows that it did cause infertility and no amount of official denials can contradict that.
Saying that that is false is pretty racist in that it implies that the Kenyan doctors are liars and the western doctors always tell the truth and act in good faith. In that case, no evidence developed by African organizations will ever be good enough.
It's hardly racist to think these folks may not be entirely on the level. (It is, perhaps, a bit racist of you to imply the WHO is only made up of Westerners, though! Considering the head is currently Ethiopian...)
> One of the most prominent was Dr. Stephen Karanja, who died of COVID-19 in April 2021, about two months after calling COVID-19 vaccines “totally unnecessary.” Karanja had discouraged the use of many vaccines through his organization, the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association.
> The Kenya Catholic Doctors Association recently issued a press statement discouraging people from getting Covid-19 vaccines, calling them “unnecessary” and “unsafe”. The press release, however, was wrong on a number of points, including claims that steam and hydroxychloroquine can treat Covid-19. The document also punted population control conspiracies; AFP Fact Check has previously debunked these and other claims. The World Health Organization (WHO) dismissed the statement and assured the public that the vaccines were safe.
> The Catholic Bishops in Kenya distanced themselves from the association’s statement and expressed support for the Kenyan government’s efforts to provide Covid-19 vaccines to the population.
I'm more surprised that there have been no malaria cases in the US in 20 years. It isn't exactly a disease like Ebola or Polio that's on the brink of extinction. Hundreds of millions suffer from it worldwide every year.
There've been cases, they just haven't gotten it here, because the local mosquito populations aren't biting infected people given its rarity. Sounds like that's changing. Goodie.
Yes, it's truly shocking that the places with the most mosquitos are a) where they try to reduce mosquito populations and b) where mosquito-borne disease pop up.
Pasteur disproved spontaneous generation in the 1800s.
Are these mosquitos made in the same labs or near that malaria testing is being done? Does reducing this specific type of mosquito in a region allow another type that has been quietly carrying the disease to flourish and expand habitat?
The fact you're not curious at all is strange. There's a lot of ways manmade meddling could create unforeseen side effects (it happens all the time) or accidents - did someone accidentally mix the mosquito batches up? Was there cross contamination?
Skepticism is a good thing but it's important to be skeptical of the scientists too.
Curiosity is different than a destructively smug confidence that experts are wrong.
Curiosity: "I am curious if any studies have been done to measure whether GM mosquitos could actually the spread of malaria, given that they were released in the two areas with new malaria cases."
Smug confidence: "I'm SURE it wasn't that tricky science experiment they're doing with GM mosquitos."
The same mosquitos been deployed outside the US, since 2009. They're also released as eggs, which is a dramatic challenge for the "they're preloaded with malaria" theory.
> Skepticism is a good thing but it's important to be skeptical of the scientists too.
There's a saying about being so open minded your brain falls out.
Great, but what are the side effects of releasing these? I agree a lab contamination is unlikely and that the science assures that these mosquitoes can't spread or carry it. But, what are the side effects of releasing these? How many times have we released something to an environment only to realize there were unintended consequences?
> The same mosquitos been deployed outside the US, since 2009.
In places that already have malaria as far as I know. Plus, a different environment.
> There's a saying about being so open minded your brain falls out.
Agreed, but there's a certain narrow mindedness to not looking outside the direct effects of doing something.
I'd at least review what we are doing and consider unintended consequences.
> Yes, that's the point they're trying to make. Malaria doesn't spontaneously generate either.
That's the point they're missing.
These male mosquitos are released as eggs. Malaria doesn't infect mosquito eggs, nor does it infect male mosquitos. Mosquitos get infected by biting (which only females can do) an infected human (of which there are ~2k known annually in the US, having gotten it outside the US and brought it back).
For the genetically engineered male non-biting mosquitos to spread malaria, several things would have to happen, including Pasteur being wrong.
"Cities have far more fire departments per square mile than rural towns. Cities also have a higher incidence of house fires per square mile. Coincidence? Of course not--clearly fire departments cause house fires."
If we didn't have any fires in our city and then we decided to build a lot of fire departments and then suddenly we began having fires, I'd be suspicious.
Malaria didn't go from 0 to 10,000 cases in the US. It went from 0 to 7. This is a gradual start, not a sudden one. It's a gradual start that scientists and even the US military have warned about for years.
Rising temperatures + uncontrolled swampland. This is as good a call as any that states need to take public health seriously, but I doubt anything will really change.
Which affected states are not taking public health seriously? How could they take public health more seriously and what direct impact would it have on this issue?
Wouldn’t this be an example of being pro heath and pro vaccine.
The science said it was a pandemic of the unvaccinated and the unvaccinated were at a higher risk of Covid infection, comorbidities be damned. Looks like the AG followed the science consensus and removed a study that was not peer reviewed nor replicated in any confirming matter.
This is only “news” because of the state and its current government’s party.
Malaria was endemic in the US south of the Mason Dixon Line until the middle of the 20th century and it's had a huge effect on our history - from playing a part in the decimation of native populations to why slavery only took hold in some places to the difficulties of some Union offensives in the Civil War.
Charles Mann wrote a great book, 1493, on the Colombian Exchange which I'd highly recommend. The introduction of malaria to the Americas is one underappreciated aspect of that he introduced me to.
Hookworm was also a huge problem in the Southern US, up to 40% of people living there were infected with hookworm. Hookworm infestations make people tired and unable to work, but are not fatal. John Rockefeller spearheaded and funded a campaign to eradicate hookworm, which was largely successful in promoting better sanitation to prevent hookworms from entering people.
Hookworms reproduce in the intestinal tract and then lay eggs, which are passed through the body inside feces. They enter the body though the feet, and the cycle starts over. Knowing this, a plan was devised to provide outhouses, shoes, and hookworm treatment to infected people, and it was successful in greatly reducing hookworm infections. Like malaria, hookworm is still around and able to infect people.
Well, western world may start treating this mankind's scourge with enough priority finally, apparently poor people suffering and dying is not concerning enough. Btw in southern Europe we are starting to face similar issue due to global climate change, aka warming.
The 1972 ban was in the United States. It wasn’t global, and even the Stockholm Convention allows for vector control using DDT. In any case, starting in the 1960s DDT-resistant mosquitos began to emerge, so continued non-targeted spraying likely would’ve become ineffective sometime in the 1980s.
The western world has been working on it for a long time. It was one of Bill Gate's primary concerns for a couple decades. There have been several vaccine attempts that failed over the years. Just yesterday I was reading about a vaccine that is now approved in some countries, I'm hoping it works out and is approved here so I can get mine.
The west already has been working on a malaria vaccine for a while now, which has been gradually earning public use authorizations.
Not to mention actually authorizing genetic tampering to limit mosquito populations and potentially even prevent them from being able to spread the disease outright. I think that being willing to risk genetic tampering indicates a pretty serious commitment to solving the problem.
Wouldn't it make more sense for those afflicted populations to get to work on a malaria cure or mitigations themselves, rather than wait around to potentially be rescued by a remote savior at some unknown point in the future?
I'm guessing you have been actively ignoring the thousands of news articles about the expected animal migrations that have been released over the last decade, eh?
You guessed wrong. I am not ignoring "thousands of news articles about the expected animal migrations", but this is not my field and that is why I put the question of the additive factor of illegal immigration of millions across our Southern border from areas known to have Malaria coupled with climate change of a few degrees. Also, "expected migrations" not confirmed as directly caused by climate change of a few degrees, correct? And these "thousands of news articles" (not science journals or papers?) factored in more than just climate change? On the topic of news articles, I've read of the coming ice age in the 70s, so I wouldn't base most of my knowledge on news articles.
Wow, the right wing fascist ideology drips off that comment.... Using so many little whistles it's astounding...
Y'all are getting good at the game...
That or you're one of the fools they've played the game against....
Please refrain from ad hominem attacks and labeling everything "right wing fascist". It's a knee-jerk reaction without thought and an insult to all who have suffered under true fascism. I asked a question in my original reply. I did not discount climate change, but only asked if millions of people fleeing horrible situations, may also be a contributing cause given Malaria is not usually found in the US per the article of the OP. Not everything is a left-right, US culture war. There are more and more Haitian immigrants also crossing illegally from our Southern border. On the CDC map, Haiti is a hot area like a lot of places in Mexico, Cental and South America, Africa and SE Asia
If your bs is indistinguishable from that of a trolling fascist pos, then why is the onus on the reader to engage in greater effort to distinguish you from such, particularly since that would permit the use of Sealioning in order to damage the ability of the reader to engage with superior works and not have thier mind slowly contaminated with the propaganda and disingenuous bs that fills such works?
Ed: came back BC there's a chance I've over reacted, primarily due to the frequency I've actually encountered those who use such games and hold such mindsets, all self identifying not just as right wing, but every class, and thus I find your actually ideology irrelevant and the fascist term is used as a short form for your engagement with the material and expectations upon others.
Not a fan of internet culture laws; they're cute but meaningless. And you got it wrong too. Poe's law is about sarcasm, parody, and extreme views. I realize that what was center or center-left is now right wing for extreme leftists, but that doesn't change facts only culture perception. I asked questions. I acknowledged climate change and I ask about migration as just another factor. It is even in the OP article. The discovered cases were in Florida and Texas which are also largely effected by illegal immigration. "travel-related malaria":
<Although both states see many travel-related malaria cases each year, those cases don’t usually lead to local spread.
I am starting to think I am being trolled in some manner by someone working out their rationalization of their posts through edits and second guesses.
Poe's law has broader implications than the initial definition.
You do know language evolves right?
I know you do, but this is another example of the game playing I was referring to when I said it.
I won't play.
And btw the Overton window has moved in the opposite direction to your claim btw.... Unless youre using the 1950s southern USA as your reference point for "normal".... But that would be ridiculous wouldn't it?
To paraphrase Sartre:
Never believe that Trolls are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The Trolls have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.
The US sees about 80 million legal visitors from overseas in an average year, with plenty from various tropical places where malaria is endemic. What about illegal immigration specifically do you wish to highlight as a risk?
If you look at this distribution map from the CDC (https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/distribution.html) you can see that Mexico and Central America as well most of South America are in yellow with malaria known to occur in some places and the US, Canada, and Europe with Malaria not known to occur in blue, I think my question is valid. How many of the 80 million legal visitors are from Africa and SE Asia or yellow or orange areas? I lived in Macau for 7 years and Indonesia for a year and spent a lot of time in remote areas with dengue fever and malaria present, and even with a non-stop flight you are 16 hours from JFK from Hong Kong not including the 2 hours at the airport and the travel to the airport. In the past few years there are now increasing numbers of Venezuelan, Cuban, and Haitian immigrants (small orange area is Haiti on CDC map) and people from Ukraine, India, and Turkey. My guess is your healthcare is not on par with those flying in legally (look at the blue areas from overseas) too, so I don't think this is an unreasonable factor to consider especially since illegal immigration is not as easy to track or control given you only count who you catch and some statistical estimates based on that sample.
Understood. One or two stories being missed, fairplay. Wondering if 5-6 being missed indicates its not really worthy of attention/a bit weird to get attn weeks later. :\",
Could someone with more expertise and background explain in *good faith* how likely this may or may not be related to the company Oxitec releasing 2.4 billion mosquitos in Florida to reduce tropical disease? I realize they only released non-biting Aedes aegypti male mosquitoes, but I'd like to hear how possible it is the safety concerns by critics were valid and some females survived. Is it impossible this is related? If not, what are the chances that it is related?
It's impossible, because those programs release male mosquito eggs (https://www.oxitec.com/en/news/just-add-water-oxitecs-new-fr...), in which malaria does not live. Malaria is picked up by adult female mosquitos when they bite; there has to be a human reservoir for them to get it from.
Thanks for the response. Yeah, that's what I had already found out. Just trying to gain a confidence level of how likely it is female offspring of Friendly™ males and pest females actually survive and carry disease. If it's 100% impossible then great. If there's a small chance the self-limiting gene actually does NOT disrupt development in some mosquitos and they live on to carry disease, I'd like to form an educated opinion on how small that chance is. I also see the self-limiting gene can be turned off with tetracycline. I know they released Aedes aegypti, which typically doesn't carry malaria but seems like it can. Just trying to gain an informed opinion without swaying into absolutes one way or the other.
You concern isn’t about some sort of side-effect of the Oxitec treatment, but rather your worry is that their solution does exactly the opposite of what it’s trying to do. Just based on this I’m skeptical. Also numbers wise, if some fraction of “Friendly Males” are actually female, or the self-limiting gene is disrupted due to environmental factors, assuming the majority of the friendly males have their self-limiting gene in tact then it’ll still have an overall positive effect. I don’t think the presence of some “defective” (or rather, not defective) mosquitos will off-set the presence of all the other ones working as intended.
I’m also assuming it’s straightforward to measure the effect of this treatment on the environment. It should be easy to confirm this really is having the desired effect. I think.
Meanwhile, the country of Belize, about 800mi south of LA or TX, has been declared Malaria-Free by the WHO, after a record of zero indigenous cases since 2019 [0],"with rigorous, credible evidence" that the there has been no transmission of malaria within the country for at least three consecutive years.
The anti-science and ant-public-health ranting in the US is evidently having an effect.
Wow, sad to see on a technology site active support for anti-science / anti-public health sentiments (of course as multiple downvotes without discussion, because such attitudes are indefensible). IDGAF abt votes, but sad to see the attiude.
Your rant makes no sense. How exactly is anti-science sentiment the cause of the first local malaria case detected in 20 years? It’s not like there’s a vaccine approved for use in the US, or that malaria is something that spreads as easily as Covid..
And sure, you compared to Belize, an island country with much limited movement compared to the US.
Anti-science is not limited to anti-vaccines, it also encompasses all the public health measures, supposedly being a limitation on "freedom" and "bodily autonomy", claimed to be steppingstones to authoritarianism - all by people who want absolute 'freedumb', and all the benefits of living in a complex society but zero of the responsibilities of maintaining the complex society.
I will grant that the connection here is more tenuous than a herd of anti-vaxxers making a measles cluster and spreading it.
But the broad anti-science thrust both suppresses general public health measures, and in openly "anti-woke" states like Florida & Texas, the administrations actively undermine public health measures, even outlawing such measures, and preventing cities/counties from implementing their own.
Thus, it is no surprise to find that Texas and Florida are the locus of these infections, and to find that juxtaposed vs Belize successfully eradicating the disease.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadBe on the lookout for malaria appraisals on coming episodes of the Antiques Roadshow!
edit: wow, jokes are not well-received I guess
One does not "acquire cancer" or "acquire STDs". Why would one "aquire Malaria"?
You usually aquire cars and houses and companies and a taste for coffee and good things - not Malaria.
The poignant example being "acquire", which historically implied "getting by one's own efforts" but has drifted to be used more passively now.
Yes, you can also acquire a car, but I'm not sure why that might lead one to think that "acquired malaria" is incorrect...
AIDS stands for “acquired immunodeficiency syndrome”.
So I guess diseases are similar? :-)
"usually by one's own exertions" does not fit contracting a disease or being infected.
In professional settings, terms get chosen for ability to reliably convey specific scenarios. I suspect that ability better determines their adoption, rather than how they might align with language norms of a particular decade.
The important bit in your wording above isn't the 'by ones own exertions' but: "to get as one's own"
Since these are people who caught malaria in the USA, rather than elsewhere and simply travelled here, the wording makes good sense.
(I just checked and no immediate hits for "malaria virus sample" on eBay so probably not, hope I don't get a visit from the good people at Border Force for this. :P )
>Although about 2,000 people infected with malaria turn up in the US health care system every year, those cases are all linked to travel outside the US. Neither those involved in the Florida cases nor the Texas case had traveled. That means in both states, the infection was acquired within US borders.
By comparison in 2021 there were twice as many COVID deaths.
[0] https://emergency.cdc.gov/han/2023/han00494.asp
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...
Also the US military warned years ago that increased climate temperature would bring back malaria to the states, and here we are.
It's absolutely coming back to the US. Mosquitos are moving north to stay in their optimal temperature range as the climate warms.
edit: My wife saw my comment and got annoyed that I listed the wrong subspecies. Updated to include Anopheles Darlingi.
So the warmer the states get, the warmer the land south of the states get. More and more mosquitos survive winters closer to the states, and so smaller travel distance.
But based on what you just said it seems that understanding is not actually how it works?
Temperature impacts mosquitos in several ways that change their effectiveness as a vector for disease.
The temperature during egg/pupa/larva stages impacts adult body size and fitness of the mosquito. That in turn tends to impact total lifespan.
A change as small as 2 to 4 degrees C can add or remove more than a week of lifespan for a mosquito (huge change, the average lifespan is 10-14 days), and the longer a mosquito is alive, the more likely it is to become a vector for malaria (and other diseases). For malaria in particular - the life cycle of the disease means the mosquito usually needs to make it at least 10 days to become a vector.
Throw on top that changes in temperature can change the feeding habits (shift them in time to make mosquitos more likely to feed when humans are out) and that parts of the southern US are now considered viable habitat for these subspecies and you get Malaria.
They do still need to interact with an animal/person carrying malaria during their adult stages - and the general strategy in the US is still to contain and treat those carriers.
We just expect it to get much more expensive as these mosquitos become more fit for our region.
Can we use bats or nematodes to fight this return?
I spray my lawn with beneficial nematodes. I saw some small decline in the number of mosquitoes born in my yard but it doesn't stop mosquitoes from surrounding areas. My next move is to install a bat house on my house.
Her advice:
- Remove standing water anywhere you can
- Use nets/screens on open windows/doors to reduce access
- Avoid outdoor activities at dawn/dusk when they are most likely to feed
- Don't plant bushes near outdoor seating (apparently they hide there during the day, but will choose to feed outside normal hours if it's convenient)
Seems we're second.
https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/location/world/index.html
A quick google search turned this up: https://coloradoinjurylaw.com/blog/dog-bite-statistics/
> Rabid dogs are responsible for the deaths of an estimated 25,000 people per year. In countries where dogs commonly carry rabies they are involved in up to 99% of infections, according to the WHO. Countries with large numbers of stray dogs, including India, are the worst affected. According to the WHO, about 36% of the world's rabies deaths - 20,000 of about 55,000 deaths worldwide - occur in India each year, most of those when children come into contact with infected dogs.
> Dying from an actual dog bite is much more rare. There is no reliable worldwide data, but of the estimated 4.5 million dog bites in the US every year, only about 30 people die on average.
It's not the mosquitoes that kill us.
Bears don't kill people. Lacerations from their teeth and claws do.
Is it the blood loss, or the stopping of the heart?
Is it the stopping of the heart, or oxygen starvation of the brain?
Is it the oxygen starvation of the brain, or the chemical breakdown therein?
Is it the chemical breakdown of the brain, or the resulting changed perception of others causing them to ascribe the very human and sometimes subjective label “dead” to the subject of the bear’s attentions?
Or is it the victim's ancestors, who made sure they were alive in the first place, thus setting the stage for their guaranteed death?
Though fun-fact: California used to have an endemic subspecies of Grizzly bear that was entirely wiped out by the European settlers. I can’t really fault them for this... times were tough back then. Some Grizzly Bears have re-enter California from the north in more recent times.
Makes me realize that in certain contexts ecological preservation is a privilege. If there’s a 2% chance a Grizzly is going to kill my darling child Timmy, I’m okay with wiping them out and worrying about the ramifications later. I’m not going to risk little Timmy being eaten to preserve some amorphous concept of natural balance. Fortunately we don’t live in that world any longer. (And >0.05% risk of Timmy being eaten is acceptable to me, since this is on par with many other risks)
And also useless! But at least you're right: it does fit in well here.
In the 90s it was discovered that fruitflies now can metabolize DDT, so it can be broken down (and still used in larger concentrations to kill them)
Not advocating DDT use, just a FYI. It ws thought to "never be broken down"
In the US, The FDA limits how much can be added, https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/what-is-quinine-in-to....
"Per FDA ruling, tonic water can contain only 83 milligrams of quinine per liter. The typical medicinal dosage of quinine is around 500 milligrams, and in the case of malaria, it is taken multiple times a day"
I lived in SE Asia for over 7 years with close to 2 years of living in remote areas with dengue and malaria. I drank my Schweppes tonic water because I am sober and enjoy the bitterness, and it gave me some peace of mind that I was keeping quinine in my system at any level.
Having cobra anti-venom was a lot more important where the nearest trauma center could be 12 hours away by vehicle due to winding, mountainous, and difficult roads before hitting a real paved road.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/145496/#:~:text=Chronic%20in....
Africa is another matter entirely. For centuries no white man made it further than the beach until an effective medicine was invented.
It does, as in they both have a common cause: rising temperatures making the United States more habitable for malaria.
1. Say you are running a mosquito breeding factory to help humanity.
2. Import mosquitos from subsaharan africa
3. Say you checked every mosquito for Malaria.
4. Pay a subcontractor a lot of money to not do this, but make it look like a mistake or lazyness or incompetence or a mixup.
5. Deny everything when asked. Deny when whistleblower leaks information. Say it was a mistake and an oversight when physical proof of malaria mosquitos are discovered in your facility and that you've been breeding them. Mysterious bad things happen to subcontractor who are likely whistleblowers.
6. 80% of the population will believe you unconditionally and flag anyone on HN who dares not believe you.
These programs release male mosquito eggs from many-generations-old captive populations, which is not how malaria spreads.
> Population level studies show no evidence of any increase in cancer incidence as a result of exposure, though SV40 has been extensively studied. A thirty-five year followup found no excess of the cancers commonly associated with SV40.
> Basically, the theory is that a hormone blocker that would cause infertility had been surreptitiously added to tetanus vaccines. This claim, like many long-standing conspiracy theories, is based on a grain of truth. Researchers had developed a combination contraceptive and tetanus vaccine that was tested in the early 1990s and was designed to prevent pregnancies temporarily (it did not have a permanent effect on fertility). But hormone blockers have never been used in tetanus vaccines available to the public; they’ve only been used in research.
Claims to have found HCG in 2017 were retracted: https://retractionwatch.com/2018/01/30/second-time-researche...
Saying that that is false is pretty racist in that it implies that the Kenyan doctors are liars and the western doctors always tell the truth and act in good faith. In that case, no evidence developed by African organizations will ever be good enough.
http://www.cmq.org.uk/CMQ/2015/Feb/kenyan_catholic_drs_state...
> One of the most prominent was Dr. Stephen Karanja, who died of COVID-19 in April 2021, about two months after calling COVID-19 vaccines “totally unnecessary.” Karanja had discouraged the use of many vaccines through his organization, the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association.
https://factcheck.afp.com/catholic-doctors-kenya-reject-covi...
> The Kenya Catholic Doctors Association recently issued a press statement discouraging people from getting Covid-19 vaccines, calling them “unnecessary” and “unsafe”. The press release, however, was wrong on a number of points, including claims that steam and hydroxychloroquine can treat Covid-19. The document also punted population control conspiracies; AFP Fact Check has previously debunked these and other claims. The World Health Organization (WHO) dismissed the statement and assured the public that the vaccines were safe.
Kenya's own government (presumably not racist against Kenyan doctors) also disagrees with them. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-29594091
So does the Church:
> The Catholic Bishops in Kenya distanced themselves from the association’s statement and expressed support for the Kenyan government’s efforts to provide Covid-19 vaccines to the population.
Pasteur disproved spontaneous generation in the 1800s.
The fact you're not curious at all is strange. There's a lot of ways manmade meddling could create unforeseen side effects (it happens all the time) or accidents - did someone accidentally mix the mosquito batches up? Was there cross contamination?
Skepticism is a good thing but it's important to be skeptical of the scientists too.
Curiosity: "I am curious if any studies have been done to measure whether GM mosquitos could actually the spread of malaria, given that they were released in the two areas with new malaria cases."
Smug confidence: "I'm SURE it wasn't that tricky science experiment they're doing with GM mosquitos."
No. They're made by a company specifically set up for this.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxitec
They have their own production facilities: https://www.oxitec.com/en/news/oxitec-breaks-ground-on-new-s...
The same mosquitos been deployed outside the US, since 2009. They're also released as eggs, which is a dramatic challenge for the "they're preloaded with malaria" theory.
> Skepticism is a good thing but it's important to be skeptical of the scientists too.
There's a saying about being so open minded your brain falls out.
> The same mosquitos been deployed outside the US, since 2009.
In places that already have malaria as far as I know. Plus, a different environment.
> There's a saying about being so open minded your brain falls out.
Agreed, but there's a certain narrow mindedness to not looking outside the direct effects of doing something.
I'd at least review what we are doing and consider unintended consequences.
Go ahead and propose a novel one. You're not the first to try and poke holes in the concept, nor is this the first test run.
For these to be able to spread malaria, they have to be biting malaria infected people in the area. The harm you're proposing has to already exist.
Yes, that's the point they're trying to make. Malaria doesn't spontaneously generate either.
That's the point they're missing.
These male mosquitos are released as eggs. Malaria doesn't infect mosquito eggs, nor does it infect male mosquitos. Mosquitos get infected by biting (which only females can do) an infected human (of which there are ~2k known annually in the US, having gotten it outside the US and brought it back).
For the genetically engineered male non-biting mosquitos to spread malaria, several things would have to happen, including Pasteur being wrong.
Which affected states are not taking public health seriously? How could they take public health more seriously and what direct impact would it have on this issue?
Florida surgeon general released altered covid vaccine data to show higher risk of death – https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/25/health/florida-covid-vaccine-...
The science said it was a pandemic of the unvaccinated and the unvaccinated were at a higher risk of Covid infection, comorbidities be damned. Looks like the AG followed the science consensus and removed a study that was not peer reviewed nor replicated in any confirming matter.
This is only “news” because of the state and its current government’s party.
Charles Mann wrote a great book, 1493, on the Colombian Exchange which I'd highly recommend. The introduction of malaria to the Americas is one underappreciated aspect of that he introduced me to.
And is why the CDC is in Atlanta.
Hookworms reproduce in the intestinal tract and then lay eggs, which are passed through the body inside feces. They enter the body though the feet, and the cycle starts over. Knowing this, a plan was devised to provide outhouses, shoes, and hookworm treatment to infected people, and it was successful in greatly reducing hookworm infections. Like malaria, hookworm is still around and able to infect people.
https://resource.rockarch.org/story/public-health-how-the-fi...
Not to mention actually authorizing genetic tampering to limit mosquito populations and potentially even prevent them from being able to spread the disease outright. I think that being willing to risk genetic tampering indicates a pretty serious commitment to solving the problem.
„‘Safe and effective’: first malaria vaccine to be rolled out in 12 countries“, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/jul/06/s...
I'm guessing you have been actively ignoring the thousands of news articles about the expected animal migrations that have been released over the last decade, eh?
https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/malaria_worldwide/impact.html
So you have read "thousands of articles" eh?
If your bs is indistinguishable from that of a trolling fascist pos, then why is the onus on the reader to engage in greater effort to distinguish you from such, particularly since that would permit the use of Sealioning in order to damage the ability of the reader to engage with superior works and not have thier mind slowly contaminated with the propaganda and disingenuous bs that fills such works?
Ed: came back BC there's a chance I've over reacted, primarily due to the frequency I've actually encountered those who use such games and hold such mindsets, all self identifying not just as right wing, but every class, and thus I find your actually ideology irrelevant and the fascist term is used as a short form for your engagement with the material and expectations upon others.
Self declared Leftists can be fascist too.
<Although both states see many travel-related malaria cases each year, those cases don’t usually lead to local spread.
I am starting to think I am being trolled in some manner by someone working out their rationalization of their posts through edits and second guesses.
You do know language evolves right?
I know you do, but this is another example of the game playing I was referring to when I said it.
I won't play.
And btw the Overton window has moved in the opposite direction to your claim btw.... Unless youre using the 1950s southern USA as your reference point for "normal".... But that would be ridiculous wouldn't it?
To paraphrase Sartre:
Never believe that Trolls are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The Trolls have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.
I SEE YOU
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-the-us-plans-t...
https://www.oxitec.com/en/our-technology#:~:text=Our%20Frien...!
You concern isn’t about some sort of side-effect of the Oxitec treatment, but rather your worry is that their solution does exactly the opposite of what it’s trying to do. Just based on this I’m skeptical. Also numbers wise, if some fraction of “Friendly Males” are actually female, or the self-limiting gene is disrupted due to environmental factors, assuming the majority of the friendly males have their self-limiting gene in tact then it’ll still have an overall positive effect. I don’t think the presence of some “defective” (or rather, not defective) mosquitos will off-set the presence of all the other ones working as intended.
I’m also assuming it’s straightforward to measure the effect of this treatment on the environment. It should be easy to confirm this really is having the desired effect. I think.
The anti-science and ant-public-health ranting in the US is evidently having an effect.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-65974440
And sure, you compared to Belize, an island country with much limited movement compared to the US.
Anti-science is not limited to anti-vaccines, it also encompasses all the public health measures, supposedly being a limitation on "freedom" and "bodily autonomy", claimed to be steppingstones to authoritarianism - all by people who want absolute 'freedumb', and all the benefits of living in a complex society but zero of the responsibilities of maintaining the complex society.
I will grant that the connection here is more tenuous than a herd of anti-vaxxers making a measles cluster and spreading it.
But the broad anti-science thrust both suppresses general public health measures, and in openly "anti-woke" states like Florida & Texas, the administrations actively undermine public health measures, even outlawing such measures, and preventing cities/counties from implementing their own.
Thus, it is no surprise to find that Texas and Florida are the locus of these infections, and to find that juxtaposed vs Belize successfully eradicating the disease.