MIT Holding, Inc., a Savannah, Ga., pharmaceuticals distributor has come out with an alternative in fighting against diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, and West Nile with its PROVECTOR ‘flower’. The conventional methods used in fighting these diseases are treating people with preventive medications which can have side-effects, the treatment of those infected or the application of pesticides, all being quite expensive. Eventually these methods become less effective with the parasites and mosquitoes becoming drug-resistant and insecticide-resistant.
This artificial flower, on the contrary, is designed to attract the mosquitoes using visual, olfactory and chemical signals in order to make them ingest pathogen-killing drugs so as to inhibit the growth and development of pathogens and parasites found in mosquitoes which are responsible for spreading deadly diseases such as malaria, dengue fever and West Nile.
The faux flower is covered by a membrane to protect people, bees, and other animals in case they happen to touch it, at the same time it can be penetrated by a mosquito’s long, pointy proboscis.
Dr. Thomas Kollars, MIT Holding’s chief scientific advisor and director of the Biodefense and Infectious Disease Laboratory at Georgia Southern University’s Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health in Statesboro says that the PROVECTOR’s drug will function similarly as doxycycline, an antibiotic which slows or kills malaria causing parasites in the blood, and therefore, prevents the disease to travel to other areas.
He added that the PROVECTOR is intended to be made affordable to the people, target being less than $5 per flower, as opposed to the expensive current treatments. The artificial petals would be disposable and would approximately last for a year, depending on the mosquito population and the amount of chemicals they ingest, before they need to be replaced.
Source: sciam
