Reddit reviews Mosquito: A Natural History of Our Most Persistent and Deadly Foe

>The best way to control mosquito transmitted diseases is proper sanitation and human behavioral changes.

Yes, perhaps in places that have the luxury to afford such things. The eradication of malaria in the southern United States is well documented, arising from the draining of swamps and the installation of permanent dwellings and screen doors(1). Unfortunately, many of the areas of the world in which mosquito-borne diseases remain endemic are quite impoverished.

Secondly, these engineered mosquitoes do not carry a mutation that prevents Dengue from being transmitted per se, but rather encode a developmentally lethal gene. If this system became defective, they would simply become ordinary mosquitoes.

Lastly, you are right to point out that the goal is to "cure" Dengue from the mosquito population, which does not necessitate eradication of the species, but rather a sufficient reduction of the population sustained for a period long enough to break the cycle of transmission. Again, think of the case of malaria in the southern US. The mosquitoes which transmitted malaria are still around, but the disease is not because the transmission cycle was broken.

(1) Spielman, A., & D’Antonio, M. (2001). Mosquito: A Natural History of Our Most Persistent and Deadly Foe (p. 256). Hyperion. Retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/Mosquito-Natural-History-Persistent-Deadly/dp/0786867817

Yes, actually. There's an excellent book I read a while back called Mosquito that goes into a lot of detail about it.

The ecological purpose that mosquitoes serve is similar to the ones that predators serve, namely population control. Species have evolved in such a way that they're actually reliant on parasites and disease, which mosquitoes spread like crazy.

That sounds dumb, I know, but bear with me. Let's imagine you have a bunch of rabbits in a field. Rabbits have evolved to eat as much grass and leaves as possible, and fuck when they're not eating. Predators have evolved to eat rabbits, but rabbits are sneaky and hard to catch so a given rabbit population will outpace a predator population pretty easily.

Rabbits will keep fucking no matter how much food is actually available, so what happens is you end up with a billion rabbits and they eat all the food. Then, all the rabbits just starve to death. It doesn't keep the population in balance, they just all die except for a lucky few. When that happens, the predators die off too.

Diseases and insects live and die incredibly short lifespans, though, so they don't need much time to suddenly show up and kill a whole bunch of rabbits. If there's suddenly a ton of rabbits, the foxes won't keep up with the population explosion, but the mosquitoes and their associated diseases absolutely will. That keeps the rabbits in check, and they won't eat all their food and kill themselves out of sheer stupidity.

There are also a number of other non-ecological reasons why we can't just wipe out mosquitoes. During the 50's and 60's, there were widespread campaigns of "FUCK MOSQUITOES," and they sprayed insecticide over pretty much the entire world. It killed a lot of mosquitoes, but what ended up happening is that the mosquitoes that were resistant to the insecticide just kept happily doing their thing. When you're trying to eradicate a species where a single individual can produce millions of offspring in a week, killing 90% of the population actually doesn't do much: they just show up later all insecticide-immune. The unintended effects of all the spraying was also... let's say not ideal for the people and wildlife in the areas where it happened.

There is a very good book http://www.amazon.com/Mosquito-Natural-History-Persistent-Deadly/dp/0786867817 that describes this creature. I'm not sure if there is a book about Mr. Gates.