February 13, 2025
The mosquito has killed billions and changed our DNA—and it’s going to get worse
Last September, scientists at London’s Imperial College announced they had managed to use CRISPR to exterminate captive malaria-bearing mosquitoes in seven generations, the first-ever annihilation of an animal population through genetic manipulation.
Last September, scientists at London’s Imperial College announced they had managed to use CRISPR to exterminate captive malaria-bearing mosquitoes in seven generations, the first-ever annihilation of an animal population through genetic manipulation.

There are many useful ways to consider humanity’s history with mosquitoes, arguably our most far-reaching interspecies relationship, but the most compelling metaphor is war. That’s an awkward notion to entertain at a time when humans are striving to think of all life on Earth as a seamless web. But the insect’s role in military and political history, in which its significance often surpassed the most lethal military technology available, is not the only pointer to war. Consider, as Canadian historian Timothy Winegard does in The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator, the bottom-line statistic. The general consensus of demographers is that about 108 billion human beings have ever lived, and that mosquito-borne diseases have killed close to half—52 billion people, the majority of them young children. There is very little of our history mosquitoes have not touched, says Winegard in an interview, down to the fundamental makeup of our bodies: “I can’t think of too many animals that have literally changed the configuration of our DNA.”

Last year mosquito bites killed only 830,000 people, a sharp drop from this century’s average annual toll of two million. We are in one of humanity’s intermittent sweet spots, Wine­gard notes, when good—that is, bad for mosquitoes—weather has held in endemic global hot spots, and “the Gates Foundation has been pushing Artemisinin, the newest anti-malarial drug, out into Africa.” But we’ve seen that pattern before in the century since we learned that it was the mosquito and the Plasmodium parasite it spreads—and not “bad air,” the literal meaning of the Italian word malaria—that cause the disease: the chemical compounds that kill the carrier and the drugs that fight the illness are successful only for a time. “The mosquito and the parasite are evolutionary marvels, both quick adaptors,” says Winegard. “By the time new treatments are mass-marketed, we see anywhere from two to 20 years before they’re obsolete.” Even DDT, the most effective mosquito killer ever, was losing its potency before Rachel Carson pointed out its collateral damage to the environment.

[…]

See Also:

(1) Savage tick-clone armies are sucking cows to death; experts fear for humans