A West African scientist has won an award from Britain's Royal Society for his research on innovative ways to target mosquito swarms responsible for the spread of malaria, Voice of America reported.
Dr. Abdoulaye Diabate will receive $95,000 toward his research focusing on the reproductive patterns of male mosquitoes - which could open a door to ways to curb the spread of malaria - as part of the 2013 Royal Society Pfizer Award.
"The important thing about this mating system is that whenever you go into a field site, you will find mosquito swarms at the same place every single day," Diabate told VOA of his research. "This kind of makes it really very easy to target, to tackle these mosquitoes and see how you can just reduce mosquito density."
Diabete found that during rainy seasons in Burkina Faso - an African country with one of the highest rates of malaria in the world - some houses contained as many as 900 mosquitoes.
His findings caught the attention of scientists around the world. The discovery that mosquitoes swarm together to mate in the same place year in, year out, presents an opportunity to disrupt their breeding patterns.
Diabate said successfully killing male mosquitoes would sufficiently interfere in mosquitoes mating.
"What will happen is that you will have a strong bias in male-female ratio," he told VOA. "So you will have more females than males. And because the female needs the male to mate, then to be able to lay eggs, so if there is no male, no mating, no eggs, no mosquitoes. And in this case, no malaria."
According to VOA, this finding "opens the door for new malaria control technologies, such as engineered mosquitoes and sterile insect techniques."
"So far, we've relied very much on using insecticide-treated bed nets," professor Sir Brian Greenwood, a member of the award selection committee, told VOA. "But there are concerns of resistance to the insecticides that are used for treating nets. And so really developing novel ways of controlling malaria vectors in very important."
Despite scientific and technological advances, malaria kills an estimated 660,000 people every year - most of them children, VOA reported. Diabate told VOA he hopes his research will inspire scientists across Africa to focus on ways of tackling malaria.
