Malaria Vector Modeling
Join Humbug and help prevent malaria deaths worldwide by tracking their spread. A partnership project between Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and Oxford University, you can get involved and help by identifying mosquito sounds and more.
Mosquitoes are responsible for over one billion cases of disease and over one million deaths each year. Malaria alone kills more than 400,000 people each year (WHO, 2019), and viruses carried by mosquitoes, such as yellow fever, dengue, chikungunya and more recently zika, are spreading and increasingly impacting on human health.
Many mosquito distribution models that map the range of these insects rely on small quantities of poorly distributed occurrence data. The data produced during mosquito surveillance are needed to identify emerging insecticide resistance, facilitate effective and evidence-led insecticide intervention programs as well as model current and future vector-borne disease transmission. There is therefore an urgent need to develop new mosquito survey methods that can provide real-time species-specific occurrence and abundance data without human risk.
A multidisciplinary group of academics from the University of Oxford have developed HumBug, a novel mosquito survey tool that transforms a budget smartphone into a sensor that detects and identifies host-seeking mosquitoes using the acoustic signature of their flight tone. It is low cost and can be used on other wearable smart devices as well as low-energy acoustic loggers. The sensor records the time and location, along with the mosquito flight tone and uploads the data to a central server where the species are identified using a suite of algorithms.
How do I get started? Just go the Humbug website and get started,
How much time will this take? This is a low time commitment. Spend as little or as much time as you want.
How do I expand this narrative arc? If medicine or infectious diseases n your narrative arc, consider building on this interest with one of the following:
If your interest is medicine in general and you are ready for a bigger time commitment (and for greater impact), see our post about the prestigious Neuroscience Research Prize.
If you are thinking about going Pre-Med and budget is not an issue, consider paying to do a Pre-Med internship like the ones offered by NSLC, the Medical Immersion Summer Academy, or the Penn Medicine Summer Program for High School Students.
HOT TIP: This is a fantastic project to build on a general interest in medicine or infectious diseases. The Pre-Med summer programs listed above are expensive and not very selective, so alone they do not necessarily boost your resume. However they are great additions to a Pre-Med themed resume if complemented with a prestigious prize or a local community impact project that relates to your local hospital.