May 2, Africa Malaria Day and SIT=sterile insect technique

Saw this Reuter's item in Yahoo! Science News. Excerpts:

Sunday is Africa Malaria Day, when governments will focus attention on a disease which kills millions of Africans a year, most of them children, and costs the continent at least $12 billion in lost gross domestic product.

Bart Knols, a Dutch entomologist at the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), estimates there are "three to five hundred million cases of malaria every year on a world-wide scale, 90 percent of which occur in sub-Saharan Africa."

"Sub-Saharan Africa also suffers the major burden... of mortality," he told Reuters during a tour of the IAEA's entomology laboratories.

One African child dies of malaria every 20 seconds. People in poor, remote villages are usually unable to get treatment and so Knols's research aims to nip the problem in the bud by destroying the mosquito that transmits the malaria parasite.
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The Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) is a simple idea. Scientists breed insects and expose the males to enough radiation to render them sterile. The males are then released into the environment to breed with the females, whose eggs are unfertilized and never hatch.

"The whole idea or concept is that the population would actually start to crash and eventually may actually lead to eradication of the insect, and therefore eradication of the disease and less malaria," said Knols, who has personally suffered nine bouts of malaria through working with mosquitoes.

Alan Robinson, the entomologist in charge of the IAEA's entomology unit, said the $4 million project was still in its infancy. He described it as a "high-risk project" with many hurdles to overcome before it is ready for field trials.

Over the next five years, they need to reach a point where they can produce a million sterile male insects a day

The males they breed must be robust enough to survive when released from planes into the environment and tough enough to compete with fertile males during mating. The females, the ones which bite humans, only mate once in their two-week lives.

Hope they can get it to work. Between careful usage of DTT and approaches like SIT and research effort perhaps progress will be made.

Speaking of research efforts, when I was in Botswana, some local people had high praise for Microsoft's Bill Gates. They aren't computer savvy and like their software but because they know the Foundation he set up has put Malaria and AIDS in Africa as major concerns. Here is an item about Malaria and here is their page on Global Health issues.