Benjamin Jacob’s creation is saving lives now and in the future.
The University of South Florida College of Public Health associate professor has developed a smartphone app that pairs his artificial intelligence algorithms with a drone and satellite images to find all the mosquito habitats in an area and then treat and destroy them the same day.
Jacob, with USF’s Department of Global, Environmental and Genomic Health Sciences, is working to fight malaria, a mosquito-borne disease plaguing Third World countries that is particularly deadly to children under age 5. He’s training mosquito abatement officers in Uganda, Ethiopia, Angola, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and other countries where the disease is rampant.
He has also demonstrated the system to mosquito control managers in Hillsborough, Polk, and Manatee counties. At one point, he located more than 2,000 tires in Hillsborough that served as mosquito nurseries. Crews went out and picked them all up, he says. A grant from the Joy McCann Foundation funded that effort.
He’s hoping to get funding from the state to continue working with local counties.
Using the technology, patented by USF, once Jacob finds a habitat – say a flooded footprint in the dirt where mosquitoes have deposited eggs – he uses satellite data systems and different AI algorithms to find all the other footprints in the village within about 15 minutes.
Once he has all the GPS coordinates, he can fly the drone to the habitats and deposit a payload of insecticide at those concentrated locations. In Africa, Jacob prefers to recruit youth from villages to go to the habitat with shovels and bury it. That way, mosquitoes don’t develop a resistance to the larvicides.
Jacob says in one test village, Gulu, Uganda, they were able to bring the vector (mosquito) count down to zero within 32 days.
“In other words, we were able to treat all the habitats, and more importantly, within 62 days they arbitrarily checked random people in the village for blood parasites and they found none,’’ he says.
In the Tampa Bay area, he goes after Culex and A. aegypti mosquitoes, carriers of dengue fever and West Nile virus. In sub-Saharan Africa, he targets the larvae of Anopheles mosquitoes.
“The Anopheles mosquito is the number one killer on our planet,” Jacob says. “We lose more people to malaria than any other disease or war effort, or terrorist activity in the world. And we’ve been battling it for years. Alexander the Great died of malaria.’’
In some areas of Africa, a child dies every five minutes from the disease, he says.
“The problem with children is it can metastasize the parasite to the brain, so you get cerebral malaria, which is very difficult for an infant to fight back from,” Jacob says.
“It happens very suddenly and very quickly,” he says. I’ve seen multiple cases. It’s a tragedy because a child will lose the elasticity of its head. It will droop. At that time, there’s no oxygen available to breathe because all its pathways are being cut off.’’
The advantage of his method, he says, is that he can remove the threat before the mosquitoes become adults and deadly.
“One of the biggest problems is that most abatement here in the United States looks at adults,” he says. “The problem with adults is, when you have an adult mosquito, when she comes out, it’s very difficult for us to be able to get her. But when they are immature, they are concentrated, immobile, and accessible within a habitat.’’
Jacob has been working on a method to fight malaria for years.
“I would always do mapping,” he says. “I’m not an entomologist by trade; I’m a mathematician. I got my PhD in mathematics.’’
He worked on “predictive modeling’’ to determine where location and habitat could be predicted. He started experimenting with satellite data, AI technology, and smartphone applications.
“That takes mathematics and it takes a different type of algorithm in order to do it, but I spent a lot of time devising the combination that would be able to do that efficiently,’’ he says.
Jacob created the Seek and Destroy program to equip and train mosquito abatement officers in the countries plagued by malaria. Access to the satellite costs about $30,000 to use for a season, he says. He’s trying to raise funds to pay for it in poor countries. His work there is being funded by the United Methodist Global Ministries and the Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church.
Jacob’s goal is ambitious.
“I’ve always been told, never use the word eradication. But that’s what I’m going for,’’ he says. “I’m trying to get rid of this thing in my lifetime.’’
To donate to help fund Jacob’s work, go to Seek and Destroy fund