When I return from Africa in the end of January, I should have a much better handle on these details. But as I understand it, DDT is still allowed in about a dozen countries where the risk of malaria is obviously worse than the risks of DDT. DDT has a bad rep for hurting the environment (including people) and developing DDT-resistant mosquito populations. In certain circles, this bad experience with DDT caused a bias against mosquito abatement in general.huckelberry wrote: ↑Thu Dec 03, 2020 5:17 pmAnalytics, I believe Yahoo was pointing to the question of how are you going to get rid of mosquitoes. I remember the ddt problem. From years back I remember a plan to sterilize large amounts of mosquitoes and release them to inhibit reproduction of wild mosquitoes. I have not heard about that for quite a while. I would suspect that the project could temporarily reduce the population which would subsequently rebound.
Sure would be nice to know how to get rid of all these mosquitoes. I remember asking that on my first scout wilderness journey. Best solution I have found so far is camp on higher ground a good distance from lakes ponds and marshes. I realize that solution is not available in various areas in the world.
The powers that be are investing in the fight against malaria by aggressively treating the disease with medical care, spraying the inside of people's homes, and encouraging everybody to sleep in mosquito nets. To date, this approach isn't working. They are skeptical about using mosquito abatement for a few reasons, one of which is that they don't think it will work there because of the geography. The main way U.S. abatement districts fight mosquitos is by going to the bodies of water where mosquito eggs are likely to be laid and killing them with larvicide before they ever fly. Effectively doing this requires detailed maps of where every lake, marsh, pond, and puddle is that could harbor mosquitos, carefully monitoring them, and treating them according to really precise, coordinated plans. Some people are skeptical that this would work in Mali because Mali is more spread out and the puddles where the mosquitos grow typically only appear in the rainy season and are scattered all over in unpredictable locations.
Next month we will be going to Mali with a team of about a half-dozen PhD mosquito abatement experts who will go to the villages in the study area and devise specific plans of what they'd want done there if they and their families lived there. Then we'll execute the plan for the 2021 rainy season and will see what happens. Will modern scientists be able to prove that we are now better at safely getting rid of mosquitos than we were in the 1960's?