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\n According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the mosquito kills more people than any other animal. It spreads several diseases, including dengue, West Nile and malaria.<\/p>\n
Ridatiningsih\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
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Ridatiningsih\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
The most ferocious predator for us humans is actually quite small: the mosquito. <\/p>\n
They are hungry for blood, spreading diseases like malaria, yellow fever and dengue \u2013 and picking up new ones all the time. <\/p>\n
But what if we could wipe out the mosquito? <\/p>\n
Gene-editing technology could do it, potentially saving millions of lives. But it comes with serious potential for risk. Which begs the question: Should we get to decide when humanity rewrites nature? <\/p>\n
Here to discuss that is Ben Bradford<\/a>, the host of a new podcast distributed by the NPR Network: Are We Doomed?<\/a><\/p>\n Interested in more science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org\/shortwave<\/a>.<\/p>\n Listen to Short Wave on Spotify<\/a> and Apple Podcasts<\/a>.<\/p>\n This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. The audio engineer was Kwesi Lee.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the mosquito kills more people than any other animal.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":462778,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[85,46,141,386],"class_list":["post-462777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=462777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462777\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/462778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=462777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=462777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=462777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}