Bill Gates visits our malaria vector control trials site in Tanzania
By Professor Mark Rowland: Bill Gates made a special visit on 25 July to the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine’s malaria vector research programme in Moshi, northern Tanzania.
Mr Gates and Dr Sue Desmond-Hellmann, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, travelled to the PAMVERC Trials Site south of Moshi town, where they met Mark Rowland, Professor of Medical Entomology and Malaria Control at the School, Professor Franklin Mosha of Kilimanjaro Christian Medical College, and Dr Matt Kirby and Dr Natacha Protopopoff, School staff responsible for the projects.
African mosquitoes are rapidly developing resistance to pyrethroid and other insecticides which are widely used on mosquito bed nets or spraying of walls, so new insecticides and formulations are urgently required. This programme, funded by grants from the Gates Foundation, is helping to develop the next generation of products to control malaria vectors.
The delegation saw the field insectaries, where mosquitoes are reared, and the suites of experimental huts. These are model houses used for testing new insecticides and new types of mosquito bed nets against wild pyrethroid-resistant mosquitoes, which enter the huts and make contact with the insecticide just as they do in local villages. In this way we are able to show whether the new insecticides are able to control resistant malaria mosquitoes under natural conditions.
The Pan-African Vector Research Consortium (PAMVERC) is a partnership between the School and African institutes for the research, development and evaluation of new vector control tools from the small-scale laboratory testing of new ideas to community randomised trials of finished products. We work with the Gates Foundation through the Innovative Vector Control Consortium (IVCC) which supports industry to develop new vector control products.
As a result of the alliance between PAMVERC, IVCC and the chemical industry, new types of insecticides and long-lasting insecticidal nets that can control insecticide-resistant mos
quitoes are in development and now being produced commercially.
After discussing the evaluation process with the PAMVERC team and observing a trial of a new type of net, Mr Gates and Dr Desmond-Hellman visited Kilimanjaro Christian Medical College in Moshi town to observe the processing of field-collected mosquitoes for resistance genotype at the Biotechnology Laboratory, established 12 years ago from a programme grant awarded by the Foundation to the School under Professor Sir Brian Greenwood.
All images above ©Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation/Samantha Reinders
Photo 1 (top) left to right: Sue Desmond-Hellman, Janice Culpepper, Bill Gates, Mark Rowland, Frank Mosha, Dave Malone
Photo 2 left to right: Sue Desmond-Hellman, Bill Gates, Matt Kirby, Rashid Mndeme
Photo 3 left to right: Raphael N’Guessan, Bill Gates, Sue Desmond-Hellman
Photo 4 (bottom)left to right: Rashid Mndeme, Max Athuman, Raphael N’Guessan, Frida Temba, Matt Kirby, Sue Desmond-Hellman, Bill Gates, Mark Rowland, Natacha Protopopoff, Janice Culpepper, Dave Malone, Frank Mosha, Jovin Kitau
