“Policy advocacy for eradicating screwworm looks cost-effective” by MathiasKB

The New World Screwworm causes tremendous suffering to wild and domestic animals on the South American continent. Gene drives make it possible to eradicate the screwworm and improve the wellbeing of hundreds of millions to billions of wild animals. I believe political advocacy to coordinate South American countries to use gene drives to eradicate the screwworm looks very tractable and highly impactful in expectation. In this post I will go over: Why I believe this to be the case What the intervention would look like Beg and plead for someone to go do this Holy shit, Gene drives Like many on this forum, I listened to 80k's podcast episode with Kevin Esvelt, where they discussed using gene drives to eradicate diseases and thought to myself: “holy shit that's incredible, we should do something” to promptly forget all about it and move on with my life. Half a year [...] ---Outline:(00:44) Holy shit, Gene drives(02:04) What is the New World Screwworm?(04:35) What is a gene drive?(06:07) The intervention: Political advocacy for governments to release a gene drive(07:40) The cost-effectiveness of eradicating screwworm(07:53) How many wild animals would it help, and how much?(10:52) Are gene drives an effective solution?(12:08) What are the costs?(12:59) How likely is political advocacy to succeed?(14:26) A call to actionThe original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: May 20th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bT3WrFn6H4fpvLSk8/policy-advocacy-for-eradicating-screwworm-looks-cost --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.