The smell of old socks can help fight malaria by attracting mosquitoes to a trap outdoors, scientists have found, and on Wednesday donors announced new funding to help develop the device.
Traps scented with the odor of human feet attracted four times as many mosquitoes as a human volunteer, said Dr Fredros Okumu, the head of the research project at Tanzania's Ifakara Health Institute. Mosquitoes who fly into the trap are then poisoned.Bed nets and indoor spraying have already substantially reduced the number of fatal malaria cases, but so far scientists have not come up with an effective way to help combat mosquitoes outdoors.
Although the global infection rate of malaria is going down, there are still more than 220 million new cases of malaria each year. The U.N. says almost 800,000 of those people die. Most of them are children in Africa.
“The global goal of eradication of malaria will not be possible without new technologies,'' said Okumu, who has been ill with the disease himself several times.
Dutch scientist Dr. Bart Knols first discovered mosquitoes were attracted to foot odor by standing in a dark room naked and examining where he was bitten, said Okumu. But over the following 15 years, researchers struggled to put the knowledge to use.
Okumu has been working on his project to trap mosquitoes for two years. He mixed eight chemical compounds to find the perfect odor, and then experimented with poisons to find one that could kill up to 95% of mosquitoes.
Now Okumu, who received an initial grant of $100,000 to help his research two years ago, has been awarded an additional $775,000 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Grand Challenges Canada to create an affordable mosquito trap that could be used outside homes.
Courtesy : TOI
No comments:
Post a Comment