West Nile virus infections are intense so far this year, with case counts running 40% higher than normal, health officials say.
More than 770 cases, including about 490 severe cases, were reported as of early September, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data posted this week. About 550 cases — 350 of them severe — are usually reported by this time of year.
Health officials are ramping up warnings to the public, because most cases of the mosquito-borne disease are reported in August and September.
If you would just STOP reporting it, it will go away naturally…by killing people that have it.
We could eradicate the handful of mosquito species that bite humans. There are like two hundred other kinds that don’t.
But no, we let them continue to flourish and spread diseases.
aedis ageypti the hardest one to get rid of due, to thier eggs surviving desiccation better than other mosquitos. the tiger mosquito, very aggressive biter spreads dengue.
We have the ability to release sterile GM aedis ageypti now that pretty much decimate their population.
https://www.cdc.gov/mosquitoes/mosquito-control/genetically-modified-mosquitoes.html
I’m not sure if this is intended seriously or not, but eradication of any species or subspecies of any animal comes with a very high risk of potential unintended consequences that can be almost impossible to predict and worse overall than the problem they sought to fix in the first place. Our approach should be focused on methods to decrease the infection rate of West Nile, decrease the rate at which bites happen or improve identification and treatment for West Nile before we jump to something radical like driving an entire subspecies to extinction. Nature is an incredibly complex system that is highly interconnected and humanity is already stressing it as a whole quite a bit at the moment, any one species loss could spark a cascade that could drive an entire biome to the brink without something else to potentially fill that niche. And it would be impossible to know beforehand what might trigger something like that.
I read “West Nile virus CAUSES running higher that normal” and that sounded pretty good to me.
