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Sonic-powered Mosquito Larvae Eliminator
Bob Vila's Hammer writes "Inventor Michael Nyberg, at the age of 15, developed the idea for a mosquito larvae eradicator after hearing about rising cases of West Nile virus. His company, Larvasonic, has developed these devices. They utilize sonic blasts at certain frequency that rupture the breathing sacs of the larvae, killing them instantly. Remarkably, it does not harm other insects and it is considered a very effective means of destroying problematic mosquito infestations."
Here's his patent for this invention:
Patent 6,298,011: Method for killing mosquito larvae
A short excerpt:
"Mosquito larvae have internal organs which contain various structures, including a small air bladder. All structures have acoustic resonance, especially underwater bubbles. Since larvae tissues are fragile, simply matching the acoustic resonance of the air bladder causes acute trauma and embolism resulting in death of the mosquito larvae.
Thus, referring to FIG. 1, an acoustic transducer is immersed in a body of water which is a habitat for mosquito larvae. A depth of immersion of only a few inches is required, as shown in FIG. 1. One or more transducer is preferably connected to an amplifier which in turn is connected to a signal generator for generating a resonant frequency within an octave range ranging from 16 kHz to 32 kHz. The transducer immersed in water is energized for a short period of time. The resultant acoustic resonance resonates with the air bladder of the mosquito larvae, causing it to traumatize surrounding tissue and causes the air bubble to migrate from the thorax of the mosquito through the abdomen, resulting in death to the larvae. An effective resonant frequency is from 16 kHz to 32 kHz, and less than one watt of energy is necessary to start the process. A larger signal generator would be necessary to cover a larger body of water with rapid coverage, or the unit could be effectively moved to various locations in the body of water."
I'm all for bat houses, but make sure you place it strategically so that your kids dont play near/with the bat guano. It can be toxic due to fungus/microorganisms contained in it.
It makes good fertilizer tho.
No, it is not "simply a matter of insufficient international research funding" that is slowing the development of anti-malaria drugs.
This is certainly a problem, and more money for malaria research would definitely help.
However, you could throw all the money in the world at the problem, and still not get a good drug as quickly as you'd like. To get a drug that is effective against a disease without also killing the host, you need to exploit differences between the host and the disease-causing organism. Malaria is caused by a eukaryotic parasite. Our cells are also eukaryotes. (Eukaryote = cell has a nucleus.) Diseases caused by eukaryotic parasites are difficult to fight, because many of the cellular mechanisms are very similar to those in the host cells. Many antibiotics (which kill bacteria, which are prokaryotes) work by disrupting things our cells don't have (like a cell wall), or by interfering with processes that are quite different in the bacteria. For instance, some antibiotics work by interfering with the protein synthesis mechanism in bacteria, which is fairly different from the protein synthesis mechanism in eukaryotes like humans.
Chloroquine was effective until the malaria parasite evolved resistance to it. All of these disease causing organisms are constantly evolving, and developing drugs that the organism can't "evolve around" only complicates the drug discovery process: you not only need to target a process that is different in the disease-causing organism than it is in the host, you also need that process to be so essential that the organism can't evolve a way to survive without it.
And by the way... we don't have an effective anti-SARS drug. Doctors were using antivirals developed to fight other diseases. There was some controversy over whether these drugs were helping or not. I can't remember how it turned out. Viruses are also difficult to combat with drugs, because they mostly use host cell resources to replicate.
I grossly oversimplified in much of this post, but you get the idea.... Yes, more money would help, but it wouldn't remove the challenging biological problems slowing drug development. It would just pay more people to try to think of ways to get around them.