Medway Insect Research Nominated for Top Prize
Insect expert Dr Steve Torr, from the University of Greenwich at Medway, has been short listed for a prestigious national prize. His work on controlling the tsetse fly in Africa[1], which spreads the fatal disease sleeping sickness, has been shortlisted for the award of Times Higher Educational Supplement Research Project of the Year.
Steve, from the university’s Natural Resources Institute, is a world expert in the control of tsetse flies. For this project, he teamed up with the University of Edinburgh to find better ways of using pesticide against tsetse while reducing costs and cutting environmental damage.
He says: “Tsetse fly is a dreadful problem in Africa, killing 30,000 people and two million cattle every year. Although insecticide is effective, it has not been widely used as it is too expensive for farmers and may reduce the immunity of cattle to diseases that are spread by ticks.”
Using a form of DNA fingerprinting, Steve’s team found that tsetse prefer to feed on the larger and older cattle in a herd. They also discovered that most tsetse feed on the legs and belly of cattle. “So, farmers don’t need to spray the whole cow with insecticide and they don’t need to spray every cow, cutting pesticide costs to just £1 per cow per year,” says Steve.
The final part of Steve’s project has been to educate livestock keepers and local organisations in the use of this technology and other methods of tsetse control. They devised a “virtual entomologist”, an interactive programme which helps farmers to plan operations against tsetse. To date 200,000 cattle in Uganda have been treated under the new system, as part of a wider campaign to stamp out sleeping sickness. Trials have also been carried out in Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe
Professor John Humphreys, Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research & Enterprise at the University of Greenwich, says: “This nomination is a great honour for our Natural Resources Institute, which has an international reputation for its work in the field of sustainable development. I am thrilled that work which has been pioneered at Medway has been recognised alongside that of the UK’s leading researchers, and that it is already helping to save lives in some of the world’s poorest countries.”
ENDS
Note to editors: The research was supported by the Department for International Development’s Animal Health and Livestock Production Programmes in collaboration with NGOs, government veterinary departments and community based projects.
For images of the research, and more information, please contact:
Nick Davison, Press Officer
University of Greenwich
020 8331 8092
[1] Torr SJ, Maudlin I & Vale GA (2007), “Less is more: restricted application of insecticide to cattle, to improve the cost and efficacy of tsetse control”. Medical and Veterinary Entomology 21, 53-64.