Stephanie Nolan:
No, I don’t think so. And I’ll tell you after a year of looking at this, I’m still kind of hopeful. I think you’re really right to be you know, striking a note of alarm, because we’re seeing mosquitoes that carry viruses like Dengue fever and Chikungunya turning up in places like France and the southern United States that have never had that problem.
I wrote about an invasive mosquito from Asia that’s now gone into Africa and is threatening African cities with malaria, which maybe doesn’t sound so shocking, except that malaria is a rural problem in Africa, not an urban one.
And so this puts hundreds of millions of new people at risk. But in places that don’t have the infrastructure to respond, because of climate change, you’re seeing dangerous mosquito species adapting to live in all kinds of new places.
And I also looked at Big Picture projects at big efforts. One of them is genetic modification of mosquitoes so that they wouldn’t be able to transmit disease, those kinds of strategies that might work for multiple diseases and in multiple places. Those are the ones that I think, keep me from completely panicking.
