The problem with malaria...
In short, evolving genetic resistance to malaria seems like a better route than trying to prevent or treat it. I’d like to understand why that’s controversial (I’m assuming it is). EA-ists are surely (some form of) utilitarians. Isn’t it more likely that trying to combat malaria will produce more suffering (by keeping non-resistant strains in the gene-pool) than by allowing us to evolve resistance?
I’m not saying ‘stop trying to treat malaria’ exactly, but I am saying ‘maybe we should put our long-termist hats on and reconsider whether it is actually (so clearly) a good thing to do’.
I’m almost certain I’m overlooking something, so looking to correct my thinking (i.e. please don’t attack me, and rather help me understand).
How do you propose evolving genetic resistance to malaria? Getting humans to a point where 100% of humans have 100% resistance to 100% of malaria strains is not really how disease works. Keep in mind that the malaria can evolve too.
By allowing evolution to do its thing. But i suspect I just don’t understand the issue properly, given aaron’s answer.
Re malaria evolving: yeah I get that but we we could easily get into the antibiotics type war (I.e. more rapid evolution) if we choose/end up with the treatment route. Evolution is great at dealing with changing environments, I’m not convinced human ‘intervention’ is better, and can see 100 ways it could backfire.
I’m all for reducing suffering, but I am concerned we’re too short-sited and/or arrogant to really do the right thing.
I definitely need to learn more about the malaria situation though.
Are you referring to genetic engineering on mosquitoes, or humans? Target Malaria is experimenting with releases of engineered sterile mosquitoes, but that’s not the same thing as “genetic resistance to malaria”.
If you’re referring to humans, I’d second Peter’s answer. I’ll also note that, were we to achieve this level of bioengineering expertise, malaria would be minor on the scale of problems we’d be able to solve (at least partly—getting 100% population coverage is difficult).
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An outside possibility is that you meant something like “it’s possible that not treating malaria might contribute to natural resistance in a way that, over the long term, is better for humanity than treatment would have been.”
However, many regions of the world are completely malaria-free, including middle-income countries in mosquito-ridden locations where malaria was a major problem within living memory. This was achieved through conventional means, and it seems reasonable that we could dramatically reduce the global malaria rate over the next few decades using similar means (or even better techniques, as Target Malaria hopes to develop).
Perhaps there’s some natural asymptote where we will find it harder and harder to clear the last few pockets of malaria, but I find it hard to imagine a low rate of malaria death being a serious long-term issue, compared to the short-term benefit of preventing malaria now. Given our current rate of progress, if malaria is still killing more than a tiny number of people two centuries from today, I expect that our world would have bigger problems to worry about (e.g. global economic collapse or stagnation).
Thanks aaron. Yes I was referring to not developing treatment possibly being better than developing treatment. But I clearly need to learn more about the malaria situation.
Learning about the facts on the ground is always a good step to take! In my previous comment, I should have linked to this article on the most recent countries to be declared malaria-free.