Robot vehicles in action to find and eliminate the most hidden points where mosquitoes proliferate and spread. All this with the aim of limiting the danger of dengue fever breaking out in urban areas. It is the strategy designed by a new study that bears the signature of researchers from the Taiwan National Mosquito-Borne Diseases Control Research Center. According to this work, published on PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, unmanned vehicles can be used to identify and eliminate the breeding sources of dengue mosquitoes in cities and towns. Dengue fever is an infectious disease caused by the dengue virus and spread by several species of mosquitoes of the genus Aedes, which also transmit chikungunya, yellow fever and zika.
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The robots enter the sewers
It must be said that, with the urbanization process, the sewers have become easy breeding grounds for Aedes mosquitoes. A place where it is difficult to track them down, given that most of the current monitoring programs struggle to control and analyze the density of mosquitoes in these hidden areas. This is where the new studio of the Taiwan Center enters the picture. In practice, the researchers combined a crawling robot, a zip line and a real-time monitoring system into an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) system capable of taking high-resolution, real-time images of areas within sewers. From May to August 2018, the system was deployed in five administrative districts of Kaohsiung City, Taiwan, with covered roadside sewer ditches suspected of being hot spots for mosquito breeding.
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The gravitraps for mosquitoes
The gravitraps for mosquitoes have been positioned above the sewers to verify the effects of the intervention of the robots on the adult insects present in the area. The result? In 20.7% of the sewers inspected, the system found traces of Aedes mosquitoes in the larval to adult stages. But the interventions went further. Further preventative control measures were carried out in the sewers, using insecticides or high temperature water jets. And, immediately after the interventions, the gravitational index (GI), a measure of the density of adult mosquitoes in the vicinity, dropped significantly: from 0.62 to 0.19.
“Widespread use of robots has the potential to eliminate some of the vector mosquitoes’ sources of reproduction, thereby reducing the annual prevalence of dengue fever in Kaohsiung city,” the study authors confirm.
A spreading virus
So the strategy seems to be working. And this at a time when “the incidence of infections caused by arboviruses – such as Dengue, e Chinungunya – has grown significantly worldwide in recent decades: around half of the world‘s population is now at risk of dengue, with an estimated 100-400 million infections occurring each year,” WHO said. the World Health Organization) in recent weeks, providing an update on the situation of diseases that spread from mosquitoes to people. And he explained: “They are causing an increasing number of outbreaks around the world, with climate change, the deforestation and urbanization which are some of the main risk factors”. Risk factors, he specified, “that allow mosquitoes to better adapt to new environments and to further spread the danger of infection geographically, also in the European region” .
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Lights on dengue
But what is dengue? Endemic to tropical regions, it is an infectious disease caused by four variants of the same virus, called serotypes (Den-1, Den-2, Den-3 and Den-4) and is transmitted indirectly by means of mosquitoes which, time, they stung an infected person. The main vector is the yellow fever mosquito (Aedes aegypti), typical of tropical regions but can also be transmitted by the tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus).
How does it manifest itself? Within 5-6 days of the sting, the disease can progress asymptomatically or cause very high fever, accompanied by severe headaches, pain around and behind the eyes, severe muscle and joint pain, nausea and vomiting, of the skin that can appear on most of the body. Dengue has a very low mortality rate (1% of cases), which however rises to 40% if the disease becomes complicated in the hemorrhagic form.