I know some are scared of the technique - but your thoughts? Thank you, Harumph

Understanding this is a result of the new world screwfly - not a virus, even so, my mind goes back to the film HUD with Paul Newman when he encounters some cattle that have contracted Hoof and Mouth and tries to get his father to hide it. I wonder if Texas ranchers will be incentivized to report incidents of screwworm infestations, or just treat it ad hoc and keep it quiet. It wouldn't make any sense to me to hide it - but fuck if I can figure out how these folks think.

We make sure ours do not get out of the room they are in, much less the building.

I know there are many places doing active population control using gene drive. The mosquito genome is pretty unusual, so it permits some specialized targeting for control measures. Much like we can poison bacteria with antibiotics w/o sideeffects for us because they have different structures than us...

I'll admit to a personal squeamishness at widespread release of organisms that are driving deep evolutionary change. The benefit of making a generation of all male mosquitoes is you don't lose the good stuff mosquitoes do, like pollination and being food for fish and birds. I just don't think we know enough about ecological dynamics to predict what might happen if we reduce the complexity of a system. Perhaps, idk, maybe a skewed male population spends more time asleep and therefore misses the time a particularly cool bird eats...

These are fascinating questions that are getting explored. Not by me, sadly, but still really interesting.

And I'll close with GMOs shouldn't be scary under controlled settings. We've been genetically modifying organisms since 20,000 BCE. It is probably a potent solution to the mosquito problem in the same way that GMOs helped solve food insecurity and allowed a human population of 8-9 billion.