ok not to be a hater or anything but there’s this one episode of the magnus archives that drives me up the wall because the premise is based on just… a complete misunderstanding of how mosquitos work
mosquitos, like most winged insects that consume mammalian blood, don’t primarily eat blood
(examples of insects that do primarily subsist on blood are bed bugs, fleas, ticks or lice. insects that consume blood but not as their primary source of nutrition: horse flies, black flies, mosquitoes etc)
mosquitos are pollinators. they eat nectar. only female mosquitos drink blood and they only do so when they are laying eggs
they don’t even prefer human blood—any mammalian blood will do. they use the proteins in mammalian blood to develop their eggs
so no lab has ever tried to develop a blood substitute to alter mosquito feeding habits as a means of disease prevention because (a) that’s insane and (b) it wouldn’t work
if you put a whole swarm of mosquitos in a cage and offered them only blood (or a blood substitute) to drink they would die. that’s all that would happen. a day later your entire population of mosquitos would be dead
mosquitos don’t eat blood any more than humans eat prenatal vitamins
oh, also, john says at the end of the episode “any solution to the issue of malaria that doesn’t concentrate on wiping them out is not one i have much time for”
which like… isn’t a bone i have to pick with the episode. obviously Jonathan Simms, head archivist at the Magnus Archives is entitled to his stupid and misinformed idea
but like. getting rid of mosquitoes entirely would collapse whole ecosystems (and it annoys the fuck out of me when people talk about exterminating them for this reason)
anyways if i was going to propose a scientific study to find a solution to viruses and parasites carried by mosquitoes i would try to find a way to genetically modify mosquitoes in a lab so that they were resistant to being pathogenic carriers and then release them into targeted local areas where the rate of transmission was highest so they would interbreed with wild populations and transmit the “no malaria, west nile, etc” genes to future mosquitoes
alternatively you could try to develop a substrate that would be the most attractive place for mosquitoes to lay their eggs and then cull a population with a high rate of disease carrying at that stage before the eggs hatch
(this would be a reasonable project for a lab like the one in this particular statement to be conducting—especially because supplying a “hemoglobish” that would help mosquitoes develop their eggs would make sense in this context)