Mosquito Eradication as opposed to netting and treatments, and why current prevention methods may be counterproductive

Note: I tried making this post on a new account but it was never approved, so I decided to bring back my old account.

Hi, I have been interested in the topic of effective altruism for a few years now, having read a few of William MacAskill’s books, watching several TED talks, giving to highly-ranked charities, focusing on a lucrative and useful career path, and engaging in outreach to help other people become more effective in their altruism.

I’ve been thinking about how the top-ranked charities, especially by the foremost evaluator GiveWell, focus on treating malaria and doing things such as mosquito netting as a way to prevent deaths, but after thinking about this issue, wouldn’t it be more effective just to do something like eradicate the mosquitoes (and other parasites, which would also go a very long way in terms of reducing wild animal suffering)? Mosquitoes are the middleman between humans and malaria, so shouldn’t we just… cut out the middleman? Wouldn’t that be far more effective than spending so much money on netting and treatments? As far as I know, mosquitoes don’t play a particularly important ecological role.

Let’s be honest; We are spending a very large amount of resources on these programs, and we are seeing serious diminishing returns, with it costing a small fortune (some charities are estimated to require several thousand dollars) to save one life. These charities are getting large amounts of funding compared to other causes that are lacking, particularly animal charities. ACE often writes about how much money their top charities could use, highlighting how underfunded they are.

From my understanding, the main reason why this sort of technology (something like CRISPR) is generally rejected is because of ignorance of the utility of this technology by the governments in these countries, believing it to be dangerous and harmful.

However, a potential caveat of focusing so much on prevention as we are doing right now (as opposed to eradication) that has been brought to my attention is the concern that these efforts (mosquito nets, pesticides) make the governments of these countries content with how things are currently operating, that this decreases the chances even further of them even considering GM technology to fix their malaria problem, which would be much more cost-effective. Sure, they’re denying their usage of them now, but will all the netting and such, they don’t even have to consider it in the first place. Sort of how climate change deniers won’t care about the increasing heat since they have air conditioners anyway.

Thanks, and I look forward to hearing your responses. It’s fairly late where I am so I wrote this somewhat quickly, I may add things I forgot to add later in a comment on this thread.