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Mosquitoes with malaria kill nearly a million people each year. And the repeated use of
insecticides make the chemical useless over time. Penn State Entomologist, Andrew Read
believes there is a simpler way to solve both problems.
One of the best ways of controlling malaria is to kill the mosquitoes that transmit the
disease using insecticides like DDT. They work great.
No mosquitoes, no malaria. The problem is that some
of those mosquitoes survive the insecticide and they reproduce. And before you know it
the world is filling up with mosquitoes that can survive
the insecticide and malaria is back. Our idea is
very simple. You don't need to kill all the mosquitoes. You just need to kill a few old
and ideally old and infectious mosquitoes. That applies
hardly any pressure. So the question is, 'How do you
kill old infectious mosquitoes?'. We think that there are three ways, you can invent
a new insecticide, you can use the existing insecticides
better- we think just diluting down DDT will kill the old ones or you could give the mosquitoes
something that take time to kill them. And we
think we have just such a product.
We think we have an interesting possibility of developing a biological pesticide that
acts in a similar way to a chemical in that we could
spray it on to wools or on to treated materials. Then
the mosquito will land on this and pick up the infectious agent. And this means that
mosquitoes that pick up the fungus don't die for maybe
ten of twelve days. Because they die slowly, this
achieves the benefit of dramatically reducing the selection for resistance.
If we do this right, we think we could create an evolution proof insecticide. An insecticide
that never selects for resistant mosquitoes. So
it never becomes useless. An insecticide that lasts
forever.