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2007-8-28 18:27:23 |
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Thursday August 09, 2007 (Foodconsumer.org) - Pesticides kill mosquitoes that cause malaria and others, but they pollute the environment. A new study found a fish known as Nile tilapia, commonly enjoyed by Kenyans, can be enlisted to fight the disease-causing mosquitoes. The study published in BMC Public Health found that a pond where Nile tilapia was raised had the population of certain disease-causing mosquitoes drastically reduced. For the study, Annabel Howard and Francois Omlin from the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology in Nairobi, Kenya introduced Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus L.) to abandoned fishponds in western Kenya to monitor how the fish could reduce the population of certain mosquitoes. They found after 15 weeks, the fish reduced Anopheles gambiae s.l. and Anopheles funestus, the region's primary malaria vectors, by more than 94 percent. The fish also eliminated three quarters of the culicine mosquito population, according to a news release by the journal BMC. The findings suggest that with the fish, Kenyans can increase their income from selling the fish and decrease the population of mosquitoes. "O. niloticus fish were so effective in reducing immature mosquito populations that there is likely to be a noticeable effect on the adult mosquito population in the area," Howard says. Malaria is a vector-borne infectious disease that is widespread in parts of the Americas, Asia, and Africa affecting 650 million people each year and killing one to three million, most of them young children in Sub-Saharan Africa, according to Wikipedia. |
