As part of the ongoing fight to fight the spread of Zika virus, a Canadian-led research team has repurposed old tyres to create a do-it-yourself mosquito trap that was dubbed ovillanta. “Llanta” is one word in Spanish for tyre.
These old and used tyres offer an ideal breeding chamber for female mosquitoes when they are filled with rainwater. The scientists used this idea and turned it around as a potential weapon against the disease-carrying insects. They fashioned chunks of the rubberized material into traps for the mosquito eggs.
“What we are aiming at is destroying the second generation of mosquitoes, by destroying the eggs and the larvae,” said Gerardo Ulibarri, a professor of biochemistry at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.
Ulibarri and his fellow researchers tested the trapin Guatemala, where species of the Aedes mosquito transmit the dengue, chikungunya and Zika viruses among the people through their bites.
The ovillanta is made from a piece of tyre shaped to contain water and a pheromone solution to attract female mosquitoes. The wall-hung vessel is fitted with a valve to direct the liquid to a filter so it can be recycled.
After the eggs are trapped on paper strips, they are destroyed and the filtered water is reused. “The key to this is the recycling of the solution,” Ulibarri said from Guadalajara, Mexico. “In these remote places, clean water is a luxury. So recycling saves a lot of water.”
They found their homemade tyre traps captured almost seven times as many eggs – about 182,000 versus roughly 27,000 in the ovitraps, the litre-sized buckets which served as the traditional monitoring devices used by scientists to trap mosquitoes before.
“This is a long process, this is a preventive process. We are preventing the (next) generation of mosquitoes,” Ulibarri said. “And if we don’t have mosquitoes, we don’t have transmission.”
The study was initially intended to see how well the traps worked as a potential means of reducing transmission of the dengue virus, a potentially fatal infection. “We didn’t think about the Zika virus because we hadn’t heard of it until the end of the project,” said Ulibarri.
The researchers hope use of the tyre-based traps can be expanded to other countries affected by the mosquito-borne diseases. A community in Paraguay and one in Mexico are trying out the devices, said Ulibarri, while in Guatemala “they are already expanding to other cities that are affected by the dengue fever, and now they are also scared of the Zika virus, of course.”
“I think this is exciting because what Gerardo and his team are doing essentially is trying to build a better mouse trap,” Dr. Peter Singer, CEO of Grand Challenges Canada said. “Except it’s not a mouse trap, it’s a mosquito trap directed against the world No. 1 public health emergency – Zika.”
Source: Global News