BirdView

History

2024: Spread of mosquitoes with drones to treat disease

At the end of February 2024, it became known that in Brazil began to use unmanned aerial vehicles to spread hundreds of thousands of mosquitoes to combat diseases. The project involves the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation and drone manufacturer BirdView.

The idea is to use the so-called sterile insect method. Its essence lies in the release into the wild of male mosquitoes sterilized in laboratory conditions. These insects compete with wild males for mating with females, which are carriers of various diseases. Females mating with sterile males have no offspring. Moreover, in mosquitoes that carry disease-causing parasites, females lay eggs only once in their lives. Thus, when mating with sterile males, offspring are not produced at all, which reduces the population of harmful insects in general.

BirdView

Quadcopters with a special container at the bottom are used to spread sterile mosquitoes. Insects are airlifted to regions that are inaccessible to conventional land transport. One drone can release up to 17 thousand mosquitoes in 10 minutes of flight, covering an area of ​ ​ about 100 thousand square meters. BirdView operates several such drones, which makes it possible to distribute up to 300 thousand sterile mosquitoes daily.

It is noted that the new technology allows you to reduce the population of yellow-turtle mosquitoes (Aedes aegypti) by 90% in three to four weeks. For comparison, when using ground-based methods, it can take from three to four months. Thus, the effectiveness of combating winged carriers of diseases is significantly increased and territorial coverage is increased.^[1]

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