Hugo Polman
The war on malaria and dengue has been going on for a while now. Most of the solutions offered nowadays are too inefficient and only treat the symptoms of the disease. Many people in critical areas cannot afford malaria tablets and even if they can, there is a high change that the bought medicine is not even effective. Therefore the solutions now lies at exterminating the source of the problem, the mosquito itself.
Generally there are two solutions possible. The first is to exterminate the mosquito itself and the second is to protect people from the mosquito. The best solution would of course be that only the malaria infected mosquitos will exterminate themselves, which is currently researched. Researchers found the way to do this, which is placing mutated mosquitos in the environment that only produce male specimens. Therefore the mosquito will exterminate itself. It seems like the right way to do so, because it is also a very cost efficient method. But even though the mosquito is a small animal, we don’t know how much the extermination will affect the total environment when they are not around anymore. So the second solution where people will be protected from mosquitos seems a more sustainable solution. Currently a project started where tubes are placed inside houses with a toxic material on the gaze in the tube. With this project comes a total evaluation of the houses of people, where gaps are closed inside walls and the only entrance for the mosquito is through the tube. When the mosquito touches the gaze, it dies within seconds, and people will not get into contact with it during the night when the mosquito is most active.
It results into an extermination at small scale, which will reduce the total mosquito population but still keeps them in the environment. Besides this, people will not get less into contact with the mosquito and therefore limiting the risk on malaria. All these things considered, I think that the best solution to malaria is taming the mosquito population and protecting the people. Ambitions to eradicate all mosquitos are too extreme, and in my opinion the best way is to find a feasible middle way. These tubes, when installed at a large scale, might offer the right solution.