Dear Source:
I am responding to a story included in the local news section of your September 16th paper about fogging not being effective for the Chikungunya outbreak. In this article the local health department has decided to contain Dengue fever and Chikungunya by educating the public on eliminating stagnant water sources around their homes. There is an even more effective way to win the fight against the Asian Tiger Mosquito and the diseases they carry. We can actually eliminate the threat.
A trap was developed by In2Care, an Innovative Insect Control and Application Research company in The Netherlands. The team has developed a safe and effective mosquito trap which targets the offending species using yeast tablets as a lure, dark stagnant water for the females to lay eggs in and a very effective larvicide that destroys the juvenile mosquito. The adult female then carries the larvicide to other breeding grounds, killing those larvae as well.
A second ingredient, a fungus, infects her and kills her after spreading the larvicide but before transmitting the disease. The trap is cost-effective, requires no electricity and could be distributed by local agencies where epidemics are already present. The advantage of this method is no poisoning of the environment including bees or humans’ water supply (Snetselaar, et al., 2014).
We, the public, know about stagnant water; it is time for health officials to use the resources available to them to augment our efforts with In2Care mosquito traps to solve the problem.
Reference: Snetselaar, J., Andriessen, R., Suer, R. A., Osinga, A. J., Knols, B. G., & Farenhorst, M. (2014, April 25). Development and evaluation of a novel contamination device that targets multiple life-stages of Aedes aegypti. Parasites & Vectors, 7(1), 1-24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1756-3305-7-200
Mary Stone
