• Opinion | The Mosquitoes Are Coming for Us - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/27/opinion/sunday/mosquitoes-malaria-zika-history.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimesscience

    She gently lands on your ankle and inserts two serrated mandible cutting blades and saws into your skin, while two other retractors open a passage for the proboscis. With this straw she sucks your blood, while a sixth needle pumps in saliva that contains an anticoagulant that prevents that blood from clotting. This shortens her feeding time, lessening the likelihood that you splat her across your ankle.

    The female mosquito needs your blood to grow her eggs. Please don’t feel singled out. She bites everyone. There is no truth to the myths that mosquitoes prefer women over men or blondes and redheads over those with darker hair. She does, however, play favorites. Type O blood seems to be the vintage of choice. Stinky feet emit a bacterium that woos famished females, as do perfumes. As a parting gift, she leaves behind an itchy bump (an allergic reaction to her saliva) and potentially something far worse: infection with one of several deadly diseases, including malaria, Zika, West Nile, dengue and yellow fever.

    Mosquitoes are our apex predator, the deadliest hunter of human beings on the planet. A swarming army of 100 trillion or more mosquitoes patrols nearly every inch of the globe, killing about 700,000 people annually. Researchers suggest that mosquitoes may have killed nearly half of the 108 billion humans who have ever lived across our 200,000-year or more existence.
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    Flying solo, the mosquito does not directly harm anyone. It is the diseases she transmits that cause an endless barrage of death.

    Mosquitoes also transmit a catalog of viruses: dengue, West Nile, Zika and various encephalitides. While debilitating, these diseases are generally not prolific killers. Yellow fever, however, is the viral exception. It can produce fever-induced delirium, liver damage bleeding from the mouth, nose and eyes, and coma. Internal corrosion induces vomit of blood, the color of coffee grounds, giving rise to the Spanish name for yellow fever, vómito negro (black vomit), which is sometimes followed by death.

    Today, roughly four billion people are at risk from mosquito-borne diseases. As our ancestors can attest, our battle with the mosquito has always been a matter of life and death, and it’s beginning to look as though this confrontation is coming to a head.

    In “Silent Spring,” Rachel Carson wrote that “our attitude toward plants and animals is a singularly narrow one,” that “if for any reason we find its presence undesirable or merely a matter of indifference, we may condemn it to destruction forthwith.” She could not have anticipated the arrival of Crispr — the gene-editing technology that can tremendously speed up the meaning of “forthwith.”

    Unveiled in 2012, Crispr snips out a section of DNA sequencing from a gene and replaces it with another one, permanently altering a genome. This innovation has been called the extinction machine because it allows us to intrude on natural selection to wipe out any undesirable species. Crispr has been used to design mosquitoes that produce infertile offspring. If those mosquitoes were released into the wild, the species could become extinct. Humanity would never again have to fear the bite of a mosquito.

    And yet, it would also mean that science fiction would become reality. “We can remake the biosphere to be what we want, from woolly mammoths to nonbiting mosquitoes,” Henry Greely, the director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University, told Smithsonian magazine. The question is: “How should we feel about that? Do we want to live in nature, or in Disneyland?”

    #moustique

  • Vous vous souvenez peut-être qu’entre septembre 2018 et avril 2019, c’est un à deux articles par mois qui sont publiés dans le New-York Times sur la situation en israel-Palestine, avec un ton particulièrement critique contre israel et la position de Trump, particulièrement ouvert à discuter de la pertinence du boycott, particulièrement incisif sur la violence israélienne à Gaza, et clairement à l’encontre de la tradition généralement pro-israélienne du New-York Times...
    https://seenthis.net/messages/793061

    Fin avril, une caricature est publiée, dénonçant le soutien aveugle de Trump à la politique israélienne. Jugé antisémite, le dessin est retiré, le dessinateur conspué et le New-York Times décide de ne plus publier de caricature. Repris en main, on note aussi que depuis lors, aucun article notable n’y a été publié qui critiquait israel...

    Après quelques mois de pause, donc, voici qu’un nouvel article pro-BDS (ou en tout cas qui analyse BDS sans être 100% à charge) est publié par le NY Times :

    Is B.D.S. Anti-Semitic ? A Closer Look at the Boycott Israel Campaign
    David M. Halbfinger, Michael Wines and Steven Erlanger, The New-York Times, le 27 juillet 2019
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/27/world/middleeast/bds-israel-boycott-antisemitic.html

    Pourvu que ça dure...

    A mettre avec l’évolution de la situation aux États-Unis (et du #New-York_Times ) vis à vis de la Palestine :
    https://seenthis.net/messages/752002

    #Palestine #USA #BDS