A couple of weeks ago I went to the Welcome Collections exhibition “Can Graphic Design Save Your Life?”. I always enjoy a good design exhibition and there were a lot of interesting exhibits to see. But the one that really caught my eye was about a Billboard in Brazil that helped fight the Zika virus by killing mosquitoes.
The World Health Organisation has declared the Zika virus a global emergency. In response a number of organisations and agencies have come up with a series of innovative solutions. The Massachusetts General Hospital’s Consortium for Affordable Medical Technologies (CAMTech) even hosted a Zika Innovation Hackathon and a little later John Hopkin’s Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design hosted another!
The solution that I am talking about was developed by two Brazilian marketing agencies: NBS and Posterscope Brazil. They invented a billboard that would attract, trap and kill the aedes aegypti, the mosquito species that carries zika, as well as other serious diseases like dengue and chikungunya.
The way the billboard works is quite simple. The billboard emits a solution containing carbon dioxide and lactic acid that mimics human sweat and breath, attracting mosquitoes from a distance of up to nearly four kilometres. Fluorescent lights make it even more attractive to mosquitoes and take advantage of their for a fixed point of light to navigate. When mosquitoes make it to the billboard, they’re lured inside, where they dehydrate and die.
The agencies constructed and installed two such billboards in two neighbourhoods in Rio de Janeiro hit the hardest. So far it is reported that cleaners remove about 100 dead insects from each billboard every day. What is even more impressive is that the insects captured and killed are targeted. The companies worked hard to ensure that pollinating and other beneficial insects are not harmed. What’s more the agencies are sharing the blueprint of their design on their website so anyone can replicate it, the unregulated dissemination of their idea being one of its basic tenets.
I think you can easily guess why this project excited me. It combines design, science, ingenuity and a desire to help and be useful. It is always refreshing to find people and companies who want more than to just make a profit, but also care about making a difference.
sources:
The Smithsonian
Campaign Live
pandora pavlides 