Devex: The challenges of bringing malaria innovations to scale
“How could air capture technology, which is being developed to limit the impacts of increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, be applied to malaria? The easiest way for mosquitoes to find humans is through the air we exhale, and Nazzy Pakpour, an assistant professor at California State University, East Bay, wondered if there might be a way to mask the CO2 that people emit, making it harder for mosquitoes to track them down. Her team won a global health hackathon at the University of California, San Francisco, last Friday, where they pitched a new idea to develop necklaces made of activated charcoal that could help people who enter areas with high risk of malaria from getting infected and bringing the disease back to low-risk settings. … The hackathon, organized jointly by UCSF Global Health Sciences and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub — a new medical science research center funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan — had teams spend three days together to come up with new approaches and tools to address the problem of outdoor biting mosquitoes in low-resource settings…” (Cheney, 12/12).