How to use mosquitoes to combat disease

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IMAGINE a small drone that could fly around sampling animals and people in an effort to see which pathogens are present in an area, and what host species harbour them. That would be invaluable to epidemiologists seeking to understand how diseases spread, and how to predict and pre-empt their outbreaks. At the moment, such a drone is beyond human technology. But this may not matter, because nature has already come up with one. It is called the mosquito.

Mosquitoes (female mosquitoes, at any rate) draw blood from animals to feed on. While doing so, they also ingest any blood-born pathogens present in those animals. What a splendid idea, thought Ethan Jackson and Jonathan Carlson, of Microsoft Research in Seattle, to design a system that captures mosquitoes so that the pathogens they have ingested can be studied. Thus, as Dr Jackson explained to the AAAS meeting, was Project Premonition born.

The core of the project is a portable mosquito trap. The current version of this is a cylinder about 35cm high, with 64 cells the size of matchboxes arranged around its exterior. Each of these cells has a door that springs…Continue reading
Source: Economist