Stopping dengue outbreaks with artificial intelligence? This is how an NGO is making it happen

Mosquito-borne diseases have long been a health concern for the world, with Filipinos battling dengue time and again.

But there’s a non-profit organization that’s been working with artificial intelligence to help stop dengue outbreaks and other mosquito-related diseases.

The World Mosquito Program (WMP) has been working with a safe and natural bacteria called Wolbachia to stop said diseases.

So impressive are its work that the WMP has been winning prestigious grants, among them from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Microsoft, to continue their important work.

“What the World Mosquito Program is doing is basically infusing the Wolbachia into mosquitoes. The mosquitoes breed and as a result of that, the diseases they carry become neutralized,” Dr. Daiana Beitler, Microsoft Asia’s Director of Philanthrophies told the select group of media at the tech giant’s Asian headquarters in Singapore.

Wolbachia mosquitos have a reduced ability to transmit viruses, she said.

According to Beitler, WMP uses articial intelligence in predicting where mosquito-related disease outbreaks will occur, up to a single square kilometer.

“The innovative part of it, is we’re not killing mosquitoes as they do in many places around the region,” Beitler added. “We’re not killing them because that has a negative effect in the ecosystem but rather, we’re neutralizing them with the use of the natural bacteria.”

With the use of artificial intelligence, the project has been scaled quickly to many areas around the world where large outbreaks of mosquito-related diseases occur, Beitler added.

WMP first rolled out the Wolbachia-carrying mosquitoes in the Cairns region in 2011, with Brazil and Indonesia following suit.

According to WMP’s website, by 2015, no local dengue cases were reported in Cairns.

The project is already present in multiple countries such as Vietnam, Mexico, Colombia, Sri Lanka, India and Indonesia. — LA, GMA News