Stinky socks could eradicate malaria

The odour of stinky socks is repulsive to humans, but African scientists have discovered it's as sweet and seductive as roses to mosquitoes.

Now the young Tanzanian scientist who discovered that is trying to build a cheap, yet sophisticated, mosquito trap to aid the global war on malaria -and Canada has stepped in to help him

Fredros Okumu, who leads the project at the Ifakara Health Institute, received a $775,000 grant Wednesday from Grand Challenges Canada and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

His team came up with the idea after seeing how mosquitoes were drawn to smelly socks. They persuaded volunteers in Ifakara, in southeast Tanzania, to donate socks they had worn for at least 10 hours. They then placed them inside boxes hung with insecticide-laced drapes outside people's homes in rural Tanzania.

Okumu said mosquitoes work through smell rather than sight.

"In their attempts to get blood from these devices, 74 to 95 per cent of all of those who landed in them were killed," he said.

His team has developed a device using a synthetic version of the sock stink and hope to make it simple and cheap enough to be made and sold by villagers.

"This project is a bold idea, one that's creative, innovative and counterintuitive," says Grand Challenges Canada CEO Dr. Peter Singer. "Who could have thought a life-saving technology could be lurking in your laundry basket?"

"We use a synthetic attractant to mimic a real human being," Okumu said. That will draw mosquitoes into a garbage-can-sized box, where an insecticide will kill the bugs.

"Mosquitoes go in thinking it's a human being, but they don't find any blood.

"Instead they get contaminated and die."

Okumu's research found that mosquitoes are drawn to humans by the scent composed of ammonia, lactic acid, carbon dioxide and other substances released by skin, sweat and breath.

The synthetic attractant using those chemicals to mimic human foot odour, Okumu's research has found, attracts four times more mosquitoes than real humans.

Malaria kills some 800,000 people per year, affecting Africans -and African children -in particular.

"This is an outdoor mosquito control strategy," he said. "The primary focus is to develop something to complement the current primary malaria controls tools: the nets and insecticide sprays used inside houses."

Okumu said the trap -called the odour-baited mosquito landing box -works best when there are 20 or more per population of 1,000. The traps are built by local carpenters using local materials, and can be produced for between $4 and $27.

Singer says the 29-year-old PhD student is exactly the type of innovator Grand Challenges Canada is looking to support.

"Fredros Okumu is a young, innovating, dedicated person who is trying to solve African problems with African innovation," he said. "We strongly believe that innovators in low-and middle-income countries are best suited to solve their own problems."

Okumu said he will use the grant money to improve his prototype, train additional carpenters, and study where the traps should be placed to be most effective.

http://www.vancouversun.com/health/Stinky+socks+could+eradicate+malaria/5094192/story.html

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