Mosquitoes

There's a recent article circulating about Bill Gates giving substantial funds to make male mosquitoes that mate and then produce offspring that do not survive (fake news? or partly fake news? or real news?  --  Readers can research and post in the comments below.)

A younger version of this writer would rejoice at this news, thinking: eliminate all blood-sucking mosquitoes.  But to paraphrase a saying, mosquitoes do not kill people, diseases kill people.  Mosquitoes can be a food source to many other organisms.  Dead mosquitoes also serve as minuscule fertilizer to the soil.  As a human if we ever think we are on top of the food chain, we should remember the mosquito and be humbled down a notch.

So maybe it's back to the drawing board to see how to remove malaria, zika and dengue from the equation.  Possible results to this train of thought would be:

• make safe vaccines and vaccinate everyone at risk
• use the mosquitoes to vaccinate everyone at risk with safe vaccines (there are some negative ramifications to this, but we need to aim not for failure but for success.  -- the "do not aim for failure" bit is from the Storks animated movie, as well as other inspirational books)
• or make the mosquitoes immune from becoming carriers of diseases
• what if mosquitoes are already vaccinating us from some diseases we have not even heard of?

So that ends this post.  So much to think about regarding that small insect buzzing in one's ear