1989 California Medfly Attack

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_California_medfly_attack

by eindiran • 6 years ago

213 99 6 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

Ironically, I remember the outbreak caused an increase in Malathion spraying, and being warned not to go outside on spraying days.

dhosek• 6 years ago

I remember the spraying and all the containment efforts, but somehow managed to be ignorant of the claimed agro-terrorism (although this was happening during my last year of college and my access to news was limited at best at that phase of my life).

acdha• 6 years ago

Ditto - I remember the spraying and other control efforts but nothing about it being intentional, which is odd since it seems like a detail which would have gotten a lot of attention.

geomark• 6 years ago

Same. And in my area we were advised to cover our cars if they were parked outside as there could be minor paint damage from droplets from the spraying.

annoyingnoob• 6 years ago

Was going to say that its really hard to get off of painted surfaces. What a mess.

JoeAltmaier• 6 years ago

I was on Stanford campus at the time. The students would hear the helicopters, and run en masse out into the streets to dance in the malathion rain.

rrmm• 6 years ago

Thanks for the article. That's super interesting from several perspectives (eco, ethical, state response to threats).

I'm curious if there was any expert speculation on the identity of the attackers and what they would have likely known wrt the damage that was possible vs the state's reaction to it.

Gunax• 6 years ago

I am absolutely fascinated that some evil genius is out there threatening entomological terrorism.

jaynetics• 6 years ago

I thought the same thing. Might make for a nice James Bond movie, complete with a love scene interrupted by a rabid swarm of flies.

saagarjha3• 6 years ago

That sounds like it’d play quite poorly among viewers.

b34r• 6 years ago

“The Breeders”

mullingitover4• 6 years ago

That's where that band got their name from!

rospaya• 6 years ago

I thought that it's from a derogatory term for heterosexuals.

djsumdog2• 6 years ago

There's a documentary on The Earth Liberation Front (ELF) that's really interesting. Many of them had noble goals, but their message was lost in the violence/destruction they caused. The FBI ended up letting one of the worst of them go after a plea deal where he ratted out other members who had moved on with their lives.

thisistheend123• 6 years ago

Hey, do you have a link to the documentary?

notadog• 6 years ago

I believe the title of the documentary in question is If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front.

brownbat• 6 years ago

This led me down a rabbit hole into the sterile insect technique, where large numbers of sterile insects are released to reduce the population.

Looks like Alphabet's Verily has been testing it on mosquitoes in Fresno: https://blog.debug.com/2020/04/nature-biotechnology-features...

branko_d• 6 years ago

large numbers of sterile insects are released to reduce the population

This has been done successfully on the flash-eating screwworm:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/flesh-ea...

wil421• 6 years ago

Florida has been doing some form of mosquito release for a while. Here’s an example.[1]

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/miami-s-new-mosqu...

ed25519FUUU3• 6 years ago

A person or group calling itself "The Breeders" took responsibility for the bioterrorist attack,[4] as financial retaliation for the environmental damage caused by the state's Malathion aerial spraying

Some of the most evil people on this planet are “good people” who believe the ends justify the means.

gHosts• 6 years ago

I note they never caught them.

Here is a scum bag ostensibly protesting an aerial pest control program that was caught......

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&object...

....but read to the end to see the real reasons.

vkou2• 6 years ago

Some of the most evil people on this planet are “good people” who believe the ends justify the means.

Are you talking about the people who were spraying Malathion?

ed25519FUUU3• 6 years ago

No, the eco terrorists.

ed25519FUUU3• 6 years ago

This makes me wonder about the murder hornets showing up in the forests of Washington. Could it have been a misguided person who intentionally introduced them?

selimthegrim• 6 years ago

Don’t give anyone any bright ideas or we’ll end up with the sodomy geese next.

TwoNineFive• 6 years ago

I don't see any way those wasps got over to WA state naturally. They didn't float over on some driftwood.

That being said, the reaction has been, naturally, hyperbolic. It wouldn't be that horrible if we ended up with permanent colonies of them over here. Finding them is pretty easy, given their size.

gwbas1c• 6 years ago

They probably just caught a ride in some shipping container.

mullingitover4• 6 years ago

Eradicating harmful insect species using CRISPR gene drives is so tempting. We could wipe out Medflies with it (without spilling a single drop of pesticide), and even more importantly, we could drive the mosquitoes that cause malaria/yellow fever/dengue/etc to extinction. There are a lot of worries about the side effects, but I'm equally worried about the consequences of failing to use it. There's a lot of attention paid to the 100k coronavirus deaths, and not to minimize those, but they pale in comparison to the equally tragic and preventable malaria deaths which go practically unnoticed.

1propionyl• 6 years ago

A genetic modification designed to spread through a population at higher-than-normal rates of inheritance, spread through a massive population of insects that act as carriers for many rapidly mutating viruses, and that feed on the blood of many different species?

What could go wrong?

mullingitover4• 6 years ago

Anopheles mosquitoes have killed more people than all the wars in human history combined, so to me the 'what could go wrong' is that we don't do anything to permanently wipe them out.

I'm not saying we shouldn't be careful, but that we should carefully, deliberately drive them to extinction.

TheSpiceIsLife2• 6 years ago

Could possibly vs the lives already lost and the lives yet to be lost.

I know where my opinion firmly lands: definitely worth considering the options.

dfsegoat• 6 years ago

Devils advocate: mosquitoes and their diseases have been with us since we were rodents.

I would express great concern at this idea, but can understand the temptation.

Why not just use CRISPR to confer malaria etc. immunity in humans?

mullingitover4• 6 years ago

Genetically modifying all humans with no side effects is far more difficult and ethically dubious than genetically modifying mosquitoes.

TheSpiceIsLife2• 6 years ago

If that’s your opinion, how do you reconcile it with being ok that Africans suffer mosquitoes and their diseases, but us Westerners don’t?

smabie• 6 years ago

Gene drive the entire human population? Are you serious? Moreover, that doesn't really help the people today.

masonic3• 6 years ago

  since we were rodents

Humans (well, most, anyway) were never rodents. You have to go back almost to the K-T event even to find a common ancestor.

ip26• 6 years ago

Engineering mosquitoes to be unsuitable carriers for malaria (and others) could be a less perilous path.

It would be something like this option:

https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/health-52530828

ISL• 6 years ago

Early in the days when nuclear physics found application, it promised to bring great benefit to society in addition to its tremendous utility in warfare. There are lots of opinions about this sort of thing, but it is a fact that our society has great difficulty dealing with nuclear waste. Furthermore, while accidents are rare, they have enduring impact in the locations where they occur.

Today, of all days, we all feel the impact of an uncontrolled and exponentially-spreading biological disaster. Gene drive can have a similar impact, if it goes awry.

To wield a weapon of extinction that we barely understand is folly. There are as many opportunities for loss of control through mutation as there are mosquitoes. While the biomechanics probably don't work out, it seems like a bad idea to attempt such an extinction when each of our tiny adversaries are equipped with hypodermic needles and a penchant for mammalian blood.

Your point regarding the consequence of not acting is very well-taken. It only takes a day or two in a country with tropical disease to understand how crippling it is, not just to individuals, but to entire continents of people. The happiness of billions of lives does hang in the balance. Before going with the "nuclear" (or should I write "CRISPR"?) option, one should explore every other avenue to its end.

I'm a physicist -- I see in CRISPR all the good and bad that physicists encountered at the dawn of the nuclear age. Be real, real careful with it.

deathgrips4• 6 years ago

The problem with this sort of thinking is that we don't live in a bubble. Even if we don't study nuclear weapons or biological engineering, our enemies will.

kortilla• 6 years ago

our society has great difficulty dealing with nuclear waste.

Emotionally, not physically. We let ignorance take over and fear drive decisions.

Your comparison of CRISPR to nuclear bombs and meltdowns just puts it into the irrational fear category.

You said yourself that you’re a physicist. Why do you think that qualifies you to talk about the risks of gene editing with CRISPR?

Gravityloss• 6 years ago

There are also other issues. Technology has advanced and information is more easily available. Nuclear technology has proliferated - even small countries can nowadays use it, and probably many large companies also could.

Biotech could be harmful in a massive way, done by a much smaller operator.

So "we" don't really get to say. Someone will just use these technologies. This is what Bill Joy wrote of in 2000, in the essay "Why the future doesn't need us". How do we organize society around this different harm dynamic?

EDIT: In some sense, nuclear technology is a great success story. Not used in anger since the second world war. Countries like Italy and Sweden had nuclear programs, but they didn't end up there. (Ariane and Vega solid boosters are Italian for that reason.) Political ways were found to contain it.

jon_elbrook4• 6 years ago

Furthermore, while accidents are rare, they have enduring impact in the locations where they occur.

And coal emission, gas spill, oil spill, dam burst, dam construction dont?

but it is a fact that our society has great difficulty dealing with nuclear waste.

France has no problem.

taneq• 6 years ago

I just look at it from a systems engineering perspective and think a whole bunch of nearly-identical systems sharing the same physical layer with no separation between them is terrifyingly vulnerable no matter what you do.

jojobas3• 6 years ago

Even factoring in the rare accidents, nuclear energy kills less people per GW and per GW*h than coal (by a factor of 2000) and rooftop solar (by a factor of 10).

The death toll of not using nuclear is higher than that of using it.

jon_elbrook4• 6 years ago

we could drive the mosquitoes that cause malaria/yellow fever/dengue/etc to extinction.

How?

Jyaif• 6 years ago

"Debug is a group of scientists and engineers developing technology to raise and release sterile mosquitoes to eliminate the ones that carry disease."

And it's used in the real world:

"Today, our scientific paper reporting near-elimination of Aedes aegypti from three neighborhoods in Fresno County"

https://blog.debug.com/2020/04/nature-biotechnology-features...

kingkawn2• 6 years ago

If you wipe out entire species of insects you will decimate life throughout the food chain

throwaway0a5e• 6 years ago

Depends on your choice of insect. The world would mostly be fine without mosquitoes. Losing ants would be a big problem. This is one of the big problems with using pesticides on crops, you kill the good stuff too.

Retric• 6 years ago

That’s 100k deaths in the US globally it’s over 350k. The US has effectively eradicated Malaria locally, which is why the 100k deaths are getting so much attention. You need to go much further down the list of US killers to find something we don’t pay much attention to.

rubidium• 6 years ago

It’s already been shown to not result in what was expected in the trial that was done in Brazil. A total Jurassic park moment. Nature “found a way”.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-49660-6

I feel like everyone missed this news?

arcticfox• 6 years ago

Evidently, rare viable hybrid offspring between the release strain and the Jacobina population are sufficiently robust to be able to reproduce in nature. ... Thus, Jacobina Ae. aegypti are now a mix of three populations. It is unclear how this may affect disease transmission or affect other efforts to control these dangerous vectors.

Uh-oh moment.

S_A_P• 6 years ago

This response pretty much encapsulates your user name 100%. That said, haven't they already started releasing "GMO" mosquitoes in Brazil?

Just googled it and looks like they did:https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/study-dna-spread-gen...

tsimionescu• 6 years ago

There's a lot of attention paid to the 100k coronavirus deaths, and not to minimize those, but they pale in comparison to the equally tragic and preventable malaria deaths which go practically unnoticed.

Actually, Covid19 has already killed almost as many people this year to date as malaria in 2018, at least according to Wikipedia (400k died of malaria, 360k of Covid19). And this is only after a shutdown of large number regions or countries.

I know this is somewhat besides your original point, but I feel that it is important to bring up, given the trend to downplay Covid19 in some circles.

lvs• 6 years ago

You've just read an article about bioterrorism and concluded that human engineering of ecology is not only safe but obligatory?

What if I told you that, if there were ever a working and effective gene drive -- instead of just people self-promoting on the basis of such things -- that it could be used as much for evil as it could be used for good?

megnaro• 6 years ago

When I was a little kid in Long Beach I remember some days we couldn't use the drinking fountains at school and stuff like that because they (city? state?) had sprayed for medflies that day. I have no details, it's just a childhood memory.

I had no reason to access that memory except that it's here on HN. As a kid I had no idea there was anything more to it, but thanks to this post, now I do. Neat.

mixmastamyk• 6 years ago

The article wasn’t clear to me on cause and effect. Did the group really release medflies in response to spraying to contain them? Resulting in more spraying, for a few months at least? Sounds odd.

DrScump2• 6 years ago

Sterile male flies were released to reduce successful matings of queens.

saagarjha3• 6 years ago

That sounds like the solution that was partaken to resolve the problem?

say-vagnes2• 6 years ago

A person or group calling itself "The Breeders" took responsibility for the bioterrorist attack,[4] as financial retaliation for the environmental damage caused by the state's Malathion aerial spraying;
It was instead ordered that, rather than 1-2 aerial sprayings of the infected communities, more than a dozen sprayings would be necessary over a period of months.[18] In addition, Malathion was no longer used alone, but mixed in a 4:1 ratio with Nu-Lure0 bait to attract insects to the area.[19]

I know, I know, hindsight bias. But it is hard to imagine that an increase in the infestation would not result in an increase of the treatment for said infestation.

Take note, future protestors. Outcomes are the only thing that matters.

TrainedMonkey• 6 years ago

Sounds like it worked:

Subsequently, three months after "The Breeders" announced the medfly release, the state ended its decade-long Malathion program and sought alternate ways to handle destructive insects.

say-vagnes2• 6 years ago

Fair point, I suppose on balance their outcome was indeed successful. Thanks for pointing that out :)

andresgottlieb• 6 years ago

Just last week I watched the 1993 movie Short Cuts, and learned about this event. Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon at it's best.

heavyset_go• 6 years ago

I just watched Short Cuts, too, so imagine my surprise reading your comment.

aaron695• 6 years ago

This will almost certainly NOT be done deliberately.

This is a common meme. It always turns out false or not proven (because it's false). See Tasmania and foxes.

It is an effective technique to harm the population, but since there is no terror it makes for crappy terrorism.

You'd need an informed public for this to work.

xtiansimon• 6 years ago

“...took responsibility for the bioterrorist attack,[4] as financial retaliation for the environmental damage caused by the state's Malathion aerial spraying”.

Awkward— This paragraph is confusing, because it sounds like the complaint preceded the event that caused it.

1989 California Medfly Attack

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