Persada Health’s malaria initiative in the Papuan regency of Teluk Bintuni, West Papua was awarded a BP Helios Human EnergyEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More Award in 2006, and a UN Public Service Award in 2018. It was implemented by experts who worked with the Australian Royal Flying Doctors Service. The work resulted in the almost complete elimination of malaria prevalence in some very poor and remote villages where malaria is endemic. The prevalence of malaria was reduced from 12% to 0.08%.
The interesting thing is, they did this without killing mosquitos.
Persada’s plan involved recruiting and training village malaria workers, mostly women from affected villages, to diagnose malaria using a blood detection test and administer a complete treatment appropriate to the disease type identified. Complex treatments were simplified with the help of custom-designed packaging with medications pre-packaged to suit patients’ weight group and to show them which doses should be taken at which times. A range of marketing materials to raise awareness of the programme, and experts from the team visited each malaria worker regularly to support their progress.
Mosquito eradication is unlikely to ever be possible – without widespread use of insecticides, which have significant other impacts on biodiversityWhat is the definition of biodiversity? When we ask, what is the definition of biodiversity? It depends on what we want to do with it. The term is widely and commonly misused, leading to significant misinterpretation of the importance of how animals function on Earth and why they matter a great deal, to human survival. Here I will try to More and environmental health. Mosquitos are important pollinators and their overall biomassThe weight of living organisms. Biomass can be measured in relation to the amount of carbon, the dry weight (with all moisture removed) or living weight. In general it can be used to describe the volume of energy that is contained inside systems, as the size of animals relates to their metabolism and therefore, how much energy they contain and More and effect on animal populations indicates that they must be part of regulatory mechanisms in surrounding ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More. The greater problem lies in the indiscriminate use of pesticides. Traditionally DDT was used to control mosquitos and this bioaccumulating toxin is notorious for its impacts on other wildlife, including birds of prey. More recently DDT has been implicated in premature births in humans.
In Ecology: a world without mosquitos, author Janet Fang surmises that a world without mosquitos would be no different to the world we have now.
However, while entomologist Joe Conlon (American Mosquito Control Association, Jacksonville, Florida) says “they don’t occupy an unassailable niche in the environment,” he goes on to add “if we eradicated them tomorrow, the ecosystems where they are active will hiccup and then get on with life. Something better or worse would take over.”
Unsurprisingly, trying to predict biodiversity consequences of removal of an entire globally-abundant insect group is beyond the capacity of scientists. When we make decisions to remove entire trophic layers we are playing with systems we will never understand completely enough to know the consequence. Conlon’s last sentence says it all:
“… something better or worse would take over”.
If you remove an evolved clade of insects from the biosphere, you release free surplus energyThe energy of a system that is emitted as waste and is not part of ecosystem processes. There is always some free surplus energy as this creates the basis for evolution where new species exploit gaps in the ecosystem where free energy becomes available. Surplus energy can occur as a result of disruption or disturbance. When free surplus energy reaches More. The “something” that takes over doesn’t have to be better or worse, it will be more chaotic.
From a human habitation perspective, having chaos(Of energy and ecosystems). Ecosystems are thermodynamically driven. Disorder occurs when energy dissipates and becomes more chaotic. For example, the release of hot air into the atmosphere results in that energy is freer to disperse (maximum entropy). The opposite is true when energy is locked into biological processes, when it is stored inside molecules (minimum entropy). Stability in ecosystems occurs More is worse than stability, because unpredictable ecosystems lead to climate fluctuations and reduced food security. The question we should be asking is: are we better with the devil we know? Are we better to learn to live with mosquitos than introducing something new and possibly worse?
The work that Persada Health did in West Papua demonstrates that malaria can be effectively controlled using a social marketing method, as opposed to mosquito control. So why not invest in those methods instead?
