Kite Mosquito Patch Project crowdfunded on Indigogo – confuses Mosquitos and disguises humans

 

Arguably Mosquitos have had the greatest negative effect on human life of anything in the world, Malaria kills between 600,000 and 1,200,000 people (many infants) per year depending on whose modelling you believe with over 200 million contracting the disease each year.

Note: This part is a rewrite of my original article, somehow WordPress ate my homework 🙂

The Kite™ platform was created by Grey Frandsen, Dr. Michelle Brown and Torrey Tayanaka, and is the result of over three years of work atOlfactor Laboratories, Inc., and over three years of research at the University of California Riverside by Professor Anandasankar Ray and his team.

The team has decided to launch this on a crowdfunding platform called indigogo.com and the campaign has been massively oversubscribed which is very heartening when you consider that most of the sponsorship packages are actually giving the patch away to 3rd world countries rather than getting something for themselves. My son has been working on a similar project to enable people to donate directly and I think we will see a big emergence of charitable giving on a project by project basis rather than just giving to a charity to distribute and not seeing the actual people you are helping or the project you funded.

Mosquitos find humans by sensing CO2 that we exhale, the patch uses a compound that disrupts the sensing mechanism confusing and disorienting the mosquito. As you can see in the picture above they are not attracted to the area with the patch.

At the moment the patches work for 48 hours, no doubt there is work going to try to extend this, I wonder if there is the opportunity to build this into fabrics or fibres as a permanent deterrent?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the topic of mosquitos here is another approach which is far more visually impressive.

 

 

 

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