Dengue has become a serious public health threat in recent years, and the alarming rise in the mosquito population in the urban areas, particularly in Dhaka city and adjacent areas, made it one of the biggest challenges to tackle for authorities. Thankfully, Bangladesh’s initiative to deploy the sterile insect technique (SIT) to control Aedes mosquitoes is generating hope that the public health crisis can be solved.
Beginning this January, Bangladesh and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) -- a UN-family organization working to promote the safe, secure and peaceful use of nuclear technologies -- are embarking on a four-year technical cooperation program to advance sterile mosquito technology as part of an area-wide integrated pest management project that aims to control Aedes mosquito breeding.
The sterile insect technique (SIT), which is a nuclear-based environment-friendly technique of birth control, will be used to mass-sterilize male Aedeses by radiation. These males, once released to mate with wild females, will help drop the birth rate as they are unable to reproduce.
An environmentally friendly, potentially highly effective, and smart initiative like this one to solve a major public health nuisance is precisely what one expects a modern, forward-looking Bangladesh to take up. This initiative is also necessary beyond its primary goal of controlling Aedes mosquitoes because the conventional pesticide spraying method -- which basically entails releasing toxic kerosene mist in the environment every day -- is hazardous to human health.
As the authorities work on implementing this project, they should not lose focus of the root cause for the mosquito problem, which is unplanned urbanization and a resulting loss of natural water bodies that created the environment for uncontrollable mosquito breeding.
With that long-term goal in mind, the SIT project, hopefully, will produce good results nonetheless.