North East expert set to fight a deadly disease

Mar 31 2009 The Journal

A NORTH East expert is helping to target one of the world’s deadliest diseases which kills over a million people a year.

Durham University entomologist Dr Ulrike Fillinger has made 18 trips over three years to Dar es Salaam, the largest city in Tanzania in Africa.

She is part of a study into ways to step up the war against mosquitos and malaria.

Current tactics include the use of insecticide-treated bed nets (ITNs), sprays and repellents with most measures targeting adult mosquitoes.

But Dr Fillinger said that the study had shown that, because people were generally protected by well screened houses and bed nets, mosquitos had responded by biting outside and earlier in the evening.

The study advises that another point of attack to control mosquitos in urban areas is to target the insect when it is in its water-borne larvae stage.

This can be done by using a “natural” insecticide made from bacteria which are toxic to the mosquito larvae.

Dr Fillinger said: “It is very environmentally friendly because it specifically kills only the larvae.

“Malaria is one of the leading killer diseases.”

The larvicide is safe to apply even to drinking water. and can be sprayed from knapsack packs or scattered by hand as granules.

In 2003, the Dar es Salaam City Council established a new urban malaria control. In a pilot study three wards of the city, covering 128,000 inhabitants, were treated with microbial larvicide .

It showed that using larvicides to complement existing measures appears to have had a dramatic effect in reducing malaria risk in the pilot areas.

Malaria control programmes have traditionally focused on rural areas, where the disease is more prevalent but it is increasingly becoming a problem in towns or cities, where over half the African population will live by 2030.