Swedish lab develops eco-friendly cocktail to kill mosquitoes
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Loading... - Justin Black
- 11 Jan 2022
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As field trials have been delayed repeatedly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers in Sweden still believe they have found the secret to a new environmentally friendly way of eradicating the Anopheles species of mosquitoes that transmit malaria.
They are quite hopeful and have founded a company to turn their discovery into a commercially viable alternative to the pesticides currently used to kill mosquitoes and harm humans and the environment.
Researcher Noushin Emami, 44, jokes that it's like having a pet, but unlike a pet, these mosquitoes are tricked into drinking a poisoned chalice.
They are tricked because the liquid is spiked with the very molecule that makes humans infected with malaria so appetizing to them.
"If we add this molecule to any other solution, we make that solution very tasty for mosquitoes," said Emami, a molecular infection biologist at Stockholm University.
"Like the taste of a fresh baguette or a pizza for a hungry creature ... just out of the oven," she told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
In December, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported 241 million cases of malaria in 2020, up from 219 million in 2019, with an estimated 627,000 deaths – 96% of which were in Africa. Children under five accounted for about 80% of those deaths.
Malaria not only sickens people but those infected attract more mosquitoes and eventually more people are infected as the mosquitoes transmit the parasite.
In 2017, Emami and her fellow researchers discovered this was due to a specific molecule, dubbed HMBPP, released as the parasite that causes malaria, attacks the body's red blood cells. Read More…
