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Tanzania uses odorous socks to fight malarial mosquitoes
Last reviewed: 30.06.2025
"Cheap, accessible and environmentally friendly" - these are the three qualities that characterize the ideal means of combating a particular disease. In three Tanzanian villages, scientists are experimentally luring malaria-carrying mosquitoes into traps using odorous socks, "where they are poisoned and eventually die."
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is one of the project's sponsors, and the research is led by Tanzanian entomologist Fredros Okumu, a doctoral student at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His experiment is the first field trial of scented socks. The effectiveness of the method has been proven in the laboratory, and it turns out that such bait attracts mosquitoes even more than living people - "at least until the insects fly close enough to realize there is no blood there."
In addition to socks worn for one day by an adult and an artificial mixture of substances secreted by the human body (such as lactic acid, ammonia and propionic acid), a third type of bait will be tested - cotton pads inserted into a schoolchild's socks for a day. The winner will be determined by the number of insects caught.
The trap is a square box, resembling an industrial beehive. Some of them will be coated with an organophosphate pesticide. A mosquito landing on this surface will die within 24 hours. The filling of other traps - a special type of fungus - acts five times slower. It is planned to set 20 to 130 traps per 1,000 people. The main question facing researchers today is where to place the traps - after all, they should not be too close, but not too far from residential premises.
Malaria kills almost 900,000 people worldwide every year, with children being the main victims. Using bait traps is a new word in the fight against this disease. Previously, only so-called vector control was practiced - a strategy in which insects were taken away from human habitation or destroyed in places of natural accumulation. Residents of endemic areas privately acquire hanging nets with repellent impregnation, as well as insecticides that are applied to the inner surface of walls.
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