EA - ZzappMalaria: Twice as cost-effective as bed nets in urban areas by Arnon Houri Yafin

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: ZzappMalaria: Twice as cost-effective as bed nets in urban areas, published by Arnon Houri Yafin on April 16, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.I'm Arnon Houri Yafin, CEO of ZzappMalaria. I'm writing about our larviciding pilot published in Malaria Journal (Vigodny et al. 2023), and this post is my interpretation of the results.ZzappMalaria: Twice as cost-effective as bed nets in urban areasTL;DR: Zzapp Malaria’s digital technology for planning and managing large-scale anti-malaria field operations attained results that are twice as cost-effective as bed nets in reducing malaria in urban and semi-urban settings.Call to actionUse our solutionFund usHow to save more than 140,000 people annually for a cost per person that is lower than bed nets?In 2021, 627,000 people died from malaria, more than 80% of whom were children. The number of people who live in areas at high risk for malaria is approximately 1.1 billion - which comprises the population of sub saharan Africa (excluding South Africa) and high burden malaria countries such as Odisha in India. According to estimates, more than 75% of these people live in urban and peri urban areas for which our solution costs less than US$0.7 per person per year. The cost to protect all these people is therefore:0.7 1.1B US$0.7 = US$0.54B.The malaria incidence in urban areas is lower than in villages so it is assumed that the urban and peri urban population accounted for 45% of the malaria death:0.45 627,000 = 282,100 people.Assuming that our solution can reduce malaria by 52.5% (based on a peer-reviewed article we recently published in Malaria Journal; elaboration below), our intervention can save:282,100 0.525 = 148,100 people.As would be elaborated below, we believe the actual numbers of both cost and of effectiveness will dramatically improve over time.What is Zzapp’s solution and how does its technology work?TL;DR: We believe in actively targeting disease-bearing mosquitoes, and use digitization to manage large-scale field operations focusing on treatment of mosquitoes breeding sites.ZzappMalaria harnesses entomological knowledge and data analyzed from satellite imagery and collected by field workers to optimize large-scale larviciding operations. In such operations, the stagnant water bodies in which Anopheles mosquitoes breed are treated with an environmentally benign bacteria that besides mosquitoes and blackflies does not harm any other animals (not even other insects) and is approved for use in sources of drinking water. Although larviciding has led to malaria elimination in many countries in the 20th century, it is not easy to implement since it requires planning, management and monitoring of large teams working kilometers away from each other. To complicate things, effective larviciding requires that a large proportion of water bodies are detected and treated on a regular basis (sometimes weekly).We developed a system comprising a planning tool, mobile app and dashboard designed to overcome these challenges. The system extracts from satellite images the location of houses and demarcates the general area for the intervention. It then recommends where to scan for water bodies, and helps in implementation through a designated GPS-based mobile app that allocates treatment areas to workers, monitors their location in the field to ensure they cover the entire area, and keeps track of schedules for water body treatment. All information is uploaded to a dashboard, allowing managers to monitor the operation in real time. Specifically designed for sub-Saharan Africa, our house-detection algorithm was developed to detect both modern houses and traditionally built huts. Our app was built to work on inexpensive smartphones and in areas with weak internet infrastructure. Its interface is simple and intuitiv...