“I’ve been working on this invention since 2007,” Anne tells RTL Nieuws. “The tube works like a mosquito net.” The ventilation pipes, called EaveTubes, are installed under the eaves of a house. It contains a gauze with a substance that kills the malaria mosquitoes.
“I had to figure out the best place for the tube”, says Anne. “Human odor rises, because it is warmer than the environment. I thought like a mosquito: if I were a mosquito, I would go in through that vent, because it smells fantastic there at night.”
Mosquito only wants blood
“It is important to kill the malaria mosquito very quickly”, says the Wageningen entrepreneur. “You know that a mosquito only wants one thing: blood.” That’s why there are pesticides in the tube. “Thanks to a special mixing method, they are very light and fine. In addition, the powder is attracted by the mosquitoes. Even mosquitoes that are resistant to pesticides can still die.”
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Anne’s tubes have been tested in the Ivory Coast in recent years. Forty villages participated in the study: in half of them, such anti-malaria tubes were installed in all houses.
Two years later, it turned out that in the villages with EaveTubes there was a lot less malaria: children were 38 percent less likely to contract malaria.
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This can have enormous consequences: every year hundreds of millions of people become infected with the disease, which is caused by a parasite and is transmitted by mosquitoes. More than 400,000 people die of malaria every year, 67 percent of whom are younger than five.
Frustration
Anne would prefer to supply the whole world with his ventilation pipes as soon as possible. Anne: “We have known for some time that this works well. But to be able to deploy the tubes on a large scale, you need help from the WHO (World Health Organization). I have been talking about that since 2015.”
The trial in Ivory Coast was part of the WHO approval process. That organization now wants another investigation. That can take years, and in the meantime children can still die unnecessarily from malaria. Anne: That’s frustrating.
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