Name: 【TED】Fredros Okumu: Why I study the most dangerous animal on earth -- mosquitoes (Why I study the most dangerous animal on earth -- mosquitoes | Fredros Okumu)
Uploaded: 2018-02-20T03:07:32.000Z
Duration: 12 min 50 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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I have a responsibility to welcome all of you once again.

have been in the past a victim of this bug here?

We apologize on behalf of all the mosquito catchers.

imagine getting seven infectious mosquito bites every day.

That's 2,555 infectious bites every year.

When I was in college, I moved to the Kilombero River valley

This is historically one of the most malarious zones

malaria manifested with extreme seizures locally known as degedege.

It's killed both women and men, adults and children,

My home institution, Ifakara Health Institute,

to address priority health needs for the local communities.

In fact, the name Ifakara refers to a place you go to die,

which is a reflection of what life used to be here

in the days before organized public health care.

how much malaria transmission was going on across the villages

and which mosquitoes were transmitting the disease.

30 kilometers south of Ifakara town across the river.

Every evening we went into the villages with flashlights and siphons.

and waited for mosquitoes that were coming to bite us

My colleague and myself selected a household,

and we started inside and outside, swapping positions every half hour.

And we did this for 12 hours every night for 24 consecutive nights.

sorting mosquitoes, identifying them and chopping off their heads

to check if they were carrying malaria parasites

This way we were able to not only know how much malaria was going on here

but also which mosquitoes were carrying this malaria.

whether malaria was mostly inside houses or outside houses.

Today, ladies and gentlemen, I still catch mosquitoes for a living.

But I do this mostly to improve people's lives and well-being.

This has been called by some people the most dangerous animal on earth --

But what do we really know about mosquitoes?

It turns out we actually know very little.

Consider the fact that at the moment our best practice against malaria

are bednets -- insecticide treated bednets.

you have widespread resistance to insecticides.

the pyrethroid class, that are put on these bednets.

We know now that these bednets protect you from bites

but only minimally kill the mosquitoes that they should.

What it means is that we've got to do more to be able to get to zero.

we focus very much on the biology of the mosquito,

and we try to do this so we can identify new opportunities.

that we can use together with things such as bednets

And I'm going to share with you a few examples

of the things that my colleagues and myself do.

Mosquitoes breed in small pools of water.

They can be behind your house or far from your house.

And so, if you wanted to control mosquito larvae,

it can actually be quite difficult to get them.

What my colleagues and I have decided to do

is to think about what if we used mosquitoes themselves

to carry the insecticides from a place of our choice

so that whichever eggs they lay there shall not survive.

This is my colleague who runs this show at Ifakara.

And he has demonstrated cleverly that you can actually get mosquitoes

to come to the place where they normally come to get blood

to pick up a dose of sterilants or insecticide,

carry this back to their own breeding habitat

And we have demonstrated that you can do this

and crush populations very, very rapidly.

【TED】Fredros Okumu: Why I study the most dangerous animal on earth -- mosquitoes (Why I study the most dangerous animal on earth -- mosquitoes | Fredros Okumu)

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【TED】Fredros Okumu: Why I study the most dangerous animal on earth -- mosquitoes (Why I study the most dangerous animal on earth -- mosquitoes | Fredros Okumu)

sort

eliminate

demonstrate

manifest