You very briefly mention that the incompatible insect technique (IIT, i.e., the release of male mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia) has been used before, but go on to imply that this is a highly risky, experimental technology that is being used on a much larger scale than ever before in Hawaii, with its people as unwilling test subjects.
You very briefly mention that the incompatible insect technique (IIT, i.e., the release of male mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia) has been used before, but go on to imply that this is a highly risky, experimental technology that is being used on a much larger scale than ever before in Hawaii, with its people as unwilling test subjects.
IIT has been used many times all over the world, including China, Australia, and the mainland United States (Fresno, CA, in 2018 was a particularly notable example), on scales larger than its use in Hawaii; it has proved extremely effective every time it has been used; none of the safety concerns you bring up have ever manifested in any of the times IIT has been used in nature; and the use of IIT in Hawaii has been driven by a local coalition of conservationists trying to stop invasive foreign mosquitos from imminently driving native bird species to extinction (their website is here: https://www.birdsnotmosquitoes.org/). A review of IIT’s previous successes may be found here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36575240/
This project is an experiment. The southern house mosquito used in the Maui project is a species that has never been used before for Wolbachia IIT stand-alone field release. At 64,666 acres, the East Maui project area is the largest Wolbachia mosquito release of any kind globally to date. Peer-reviewed studies have shown Wolbachia bacteria to cause mosquitoes to become more capable of transmitting avian malaria https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4154766/ and West Nile virus (bird and human) https://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd.0002965.
Southern house mosquitoes transmit human diseases, including West Nile virus, elephantiasis, encephalitis, and potentially Zika virus. Pathogen screenings of these imported bacteria-infected mosquitoes are unknown, and our FOIA request to the EPA resulted in that information being withheld. EPA guidelines allow for the weekly release on Maui of over 3,100 female mosquitoes that bite, breed, and spread disease.
"Birds, Not Mosquitoes" is not a local coalition of conservationists, it is a multi-agency partnership and steering committee comprised of state, federal, and non-governmental organizations motivated by millions of dollars in federal funding and a biotech industry agenda that includes the build-out of an insectary on Oahu where lab-altered mosquitoes will be mass produced for release on the islands into perpetuity (per the agencies' own documents). Long-term goals include gene drives, synthetic biology control tools, and mass production in the Hawai'i lab of gene-edited precision-guided Sterile Insect Technique (pgSIT) CRISPR mosquitoes.
Two more species of mosquito are also planned for import into Hawai‘i – Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. The State of Hawai'i Department of Health plans to release mosquitoes on the ground using cars, trucks, or ATVs to control mosquitoes of “public health concern.”
All of our research comes from peer-reviewed studies, scientific expert opinions, and the agencies' own documents.
Thanks for this. I thought Birds not Mosquitos might have been an industry front group (it had the appearance of one but I didn't research it in detail).
I just found this in one of the CHD articles on this:
"Birds, Not Mosquitoes states that the project is funded through a mix of public and private donors, including anonymous donors, including the American Bird Conservancy, Hawaiʻi Department of Land and Natural Resources, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, The Nature Conservancy, and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.
Previous funders included “the Hawaiʻi Invasive Species Council and anonymous private donors.”
Another organization that partners in the project, the Kauai Forest Bird Recovery Project, lists Corteva Agriscience as one of its partners. Corteva Agriscience is a conglomerate formed via the merger of Dow AgroSciences and DuPont/Pioneer and owns many patents for the CRISPR gene-editing technology."
Thank you for this very well-informed reply. You know far more about local Hawaiian politics than I do, so I will defer to your judgement about the makeup of Birds, Not Mosquitoes.
With regard to the proposed IIT, my understanding is that both avian malaria and the southern house mosquito are invasive species that were artificially introduced to the islands by colonists. It’s also my understanding that the only mosquitos that have been approved to be released by the EPA (and biologically the only species that would make sense, since by definition different species can’t really mate) are more southern house mosquitos taken from nearby Palmyra Atoll. So it wouldn’t be a situation where a novel mosquito is being introduced - it’s simply adding more of what is already there. And because of the QC standards for manufacturing mosquitos - my guess is that you would be thousands of times more likely to get some human pathogen from a regular wild mosquito than a lab-grown one.
I thought your reference to Wolbachia potentially enhancing pathogen transmission was interesting, but since all of these native species are about to go extinct anyway, I’m guessing hypothetical concerns about avian malaria infection being enhanced are not applicable here.
Mahalo for your response. The Application for Section 18 FIFRA Emergency Exemption for use of the lab-altered mosquitoes ("DQB Males") https://hawaiiunites.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/EPA-HQ-OPP-2022-0896-0002_content.pdf specifies that the "DQB line of mosquitoes was developed through transfection of Wolbachia pipientis wAlbB isolated from Ae. albopictus KLP strain mosquitoes originating from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia into Culex quinquefasciatus Palmyra strain mosquitoes originating from Palmyra Atoll." These are foreign organisms.
This mosquito release plan has not been sufficiently studied as required for a project of this scope and magnitude that has potential significant impacts to the health of our island's people, wildlife, and 'āina. We have taken state agencies to court to seek a ruling that an environmental impact statement be completed, per the Hawai'i Environmental Policy Act (HEPA).
In the words of tropical disease and vector expert Dr. Lorrin Pang (expert witness in our case), "It is not only what ‘might’ happen, but quantitatively how likely or unlikely might it happen – both the benefits and the side effects." There's no way of answering this question without doing the comprehensive studies needed.
Thank you for your comment. I looked into that before writing this because I wanted to make sure I accurately portrayed the technology. That was specifically why I said: "Both of these approaches have had some success and have been gradually deployed on a larger and larger scale around the world."
Regarding the "coalition of local conservationists" please see the comments below.
You very briefly mention that the incompatible insect technique (IIT, i.e., the release of male mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia) has been used before, but go on to imply that this is a highly risky, experimental technology that is being used on a much larger scale than ever before in Hawaii, with its people as unwilling test subjects.
IIT has been used many times all over the world, including China, Australia, and the mainland United States (Fresno, CA, in 2018 was a particularly notable example), on scales larger than its use in Hawaii; it has proved extremely effective every time it has been used; none of the safety concerns you bring up have ever manifested in any of the times IIT has been used in nature; and the use of IIT in Hawaii has been driven by a local coalition of conservationists trying to stop invasive foreign mosquitos from imminently driving native bird species to extinction (their website is here: https://www.birdsnotmosquitoes.org/). A review of IIT’s previous successes may be found here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36575240/
This project is an experiment. The southern house mosquito used in the Maui project is a species that has never been used before for Wolbachia IIT stand-alone field release. At 64,666 acres, the East Maui project area is the largest Wolbachia mosquito release of any kind globally to date. Peer-reviewed studies have shown Wolbachia bacteria to cause mosquitoes to become more capable of transmitting avian malaria https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4154766/ and West Nile virus (bird and human) https://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd.0002965.
Southern house mosquitoes transmit human diseases, including West Nile virus, elephantiasis, encephalitis, and potentially Zika virus. Pathogen screenings of these imported bacteria-infected mosquitoes are unknown, and our FOIA request to the EPA resulted in that information being withheld. EPA guidelines allow for the weekly release on Maui of over 3,100 female mosquitoes that bite, breed, and spread disease.
"Birds, Not Mosquitoes" is not a local coalition of conservationists, it is a multi-agency partnership and steering committee comprised of state, federal, and non-governmental organizations motivated by millions of dollars in federal funding and a biotech industry agenda that includes the build-out of an insectary on Oahu where lab-altered mosquitoes will be mass produced for release on the islands into perpetuity (per the agencies' own documents). Long-term goals include gene drives, synthetic biology control tools, and mass production in the Hawai'i lab of gene-edited precision-guided Sterile Insect Technique (pgSIT) CRISPR mosquitoes.
Two more species of mosquito are also planned for import into Hawai‘i – Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. The State of Hawai'i Department of Health plans to release mosquitoes on the ground using cars, trucks, or ATVs to control mosquitoes of “public health concern.”
All of our research comes from peer-reviewed studies, scientific expert opinions, and the agencies' own documents.
More information can be found on our website HawaiiUnites.org.
Thanks for this. I thought Birds not Mosquitos might have been an industry front group (it had the appearance of one but I didn't research it in detail).
I just found this in one of the CHD articles on this:
"Birds, Not Mosquitoes states that the project is funded through a mix of public and private donors, including anonymous donors, including the American Bird Conservancy, Hawaiʻi Department of Land and Natural Resources, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, The Nature Conservancy, and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.
Previous funders included “the Hawaiʻi Invasive Species Council and anonymous private donors.”
Another organization that partners in the project, the Kauai Forest Bird Recovery Project, lists Corteva Agriscience as one of its partners. Corteva Agriscience is a conglomerate formed via the merger of Dow AgroSciences and DuPont/Pioneer and owns many patents for the CRISPR gene-editing technology."
Thank you for this very well-informed reply. You know far more about local Hawaiian politics than I do, so I will defer to your judgement about the makeup of Birds, Not Mosquitoes.
With regard to the proposed IIT, my understanding is that both avian malaria and the southern house mosquito are invasive species that were artificially introduced to the islands by colonists. It’s also my understanding that the only mosquitos that have been approved to be released by the EPA (and biologically the only species that would make sense, since by definition different species can’t really mate) are more southern house mosquitos taken from nearby Palmyra Atoll. So it wouldn’t be a situation where a novel mosquito is being introduced - it’s simply adding more of what is already there. And because of the QC standards for manufacturing mosquitos - my guess is that you would be thousands of times more likely to get some human pathogen from a regular wild mosquito than a lab-grown one.
I thought your reference to Wolbachia potentially enhancing pathogen transmission was interesting, but since all of these native species are about to go extinct anyway, I’m guessing hypothetical concerns about avian malaria infection being enhanced are not applicable here.
Mahalo for your response. The Application for Section 18 FIFRA Emergency Exemption for use of the lab-altered mosquitoes ("DQB Males") https://hawaiiunites.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/EPA-HQ-OPP-2022-0896-0002_content.pdf specifies that the "DQB line of mosquitoes was developed through transfection of Wolbachia pipientis wAlbB isolated from Ae. albopictus KLP strain mosquitoes originating from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia into Culex quinquefasciatus Palmyra strain mosquitoes originating from Palmyra Atoll." These are foreign organisms.
This mosquito release plan has not been sufficiently studied as required for a project of this scope and magnitude that has potential significant impacts to the health of our island's people, wildlife, and 'āina. We have taken state agencies to court to seek a ruling that an environmental impact statement be completed, per the Hawai'i Environmental Policy Act (HEPA).
In the words of tropical disease and vector expert Dr. Lorrin Pang (expert witness in our case), "It is not only what ‘might’ happen, but quantitatively how likely or unlikely might it happen – both the benefits and the side effects." There's no way of answering this question without doing the comprehensive studies needed.
Dr. Lorrin Pang's full response to the judge's decision: https://www.newsletter.hawaiiunites.org/p/we-can-do-this-13000-more-needed
Dr. Lorrin among my oldest heroes & favorites Biotech Mafia opponents! <3
Thank you for your comment. I looked into that before writing this because I wanted to make sure I accurately portrayed the technology. That was specifically why I said: "Both of these approaches have had some success and have been gradually deployed on a larger and larger scale around the world."
Regarding the "coalition of local conservationists" please see the comments below.
From the NIH???? 🤣😂😂😂🤣☠️