TAIWANESE researchers say that their unmanned mosquito-hunting sewer bots can scour the underground network of pipes for the dengue-carrying vampires and kill them off before they make it to the surface.
According to a new study published this week in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases the research team from Taiwan National Mosquito-Borne Diseases Control Research Center tested a crawling robot attached to a controllable cable car and a real-time monitoring system and sent it into the sewers on a mozzie hunt.
They found that 20.7% of the sewers the researchers inspected had traces of Aedes mosquito - the ones known to carry dengue, chikungunya, yellow fever and zika.
The robots were then able to swiftly cause a "mozpocalypse" using insecticides or high-temperature water jets, which the team say caused a significant drop in the buzzy-buggers in the area.
"The widespread use of UGVs can potentially eliminate some of the breeding sources of vector mosquitoes, thereby reducing the annual prevalence of dengue fever in Kaohsiung city," the authors said.
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