- SEIBERSDORF, Austria (Reuters)
-- The United Nations is harnessing nuclear technology to try to eradicate
the mosquitoes whose bite transmits malaria, a deadly disease devastating
the African continent.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- "Sub-Saharan Africa also suffers the major burden...
of mortality," he told Reuters during a tour of the IAEA's entomology
laboratories.
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- 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 IAEA is best known for its inspections of countries
like Iran and Iraq who are suspected of building atomic weapons. But the
agency has already used its expertise to wipe out the dreaded tsetse fly,
which can transmit fatal sleeping sickness, from the island of Zanzibar.
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- NUKING MOSQUITOES
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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.
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- "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.
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- 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.
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- Over the next five years, they need to reach a point
where they can produce a million sterile male insects a day.
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- 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.
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- Knols and Robinson point out that in the 1970s, El Salvador
successfully used the SIT to eradicate the malaria mosquito from part of
the country.
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- "They brought that insect into the lab, started
producing it in large numbers, sterilized it and then released it in a
small area... about 15 square kilometers, and successfully induced 100
percent sterility in the population," Knols said.
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- Afterwards, they started a much larger project in which
they were producing a million male insects a day. But when civil war broke
out the project ended.
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- "We think we can do a better job than they did in
El Salvador," said Robinson.
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- He said the technique of sterilization could not be used
all over Africa and would have to be combined with other population control
techniques to eradicate the malaria pest.
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- "But there's no alternative to irradiation for the
sterile insect technique. It's a very clean technique," he said, adding
that there was no risk of contamination. "The insects are not radioactive
when they're released."
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