The United Nations is harnessing nuclear technology to try to eradicate the mosquitoes whose bite transmits malaria, a deadly disease devastating the African continent.
Sunday is Africa Malaria Day, when governments will focus attention on a disease which kills millions of Africans a year, most of them children, and costs the continent at least $12 billion in lost gross domestic product.
Bart Knols, a Dutch entomologist at the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), estimates there are "three to five hundred million cases of malaria every year on a world-wide scale, 90 percent of which occur in sub-Saharan Africa".
"Sub-Saharan Africa also suffers the major burden... of mortality," he told Reuters during a tour of the IAEA's entomology laboratories.
One African child dies of malaria every 20 seconds. People in poor, remote villages are usually unable to get treatment and so Knols's research aims to nip the problem in the bud by destroying the mosquito that transmits the malaria parasite.
The IAEA is best known for its inspections of countries like Iran and Iraq who are suspected of building atomic weapons. But the agency has already used its expertise to wipe out the dreaded tsetse fly, which can transmit fatal sleeping sickness, from the island of Zanzibar.
The Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) is a simple idea. Scientists breed insects and expose the males to enough radiation to render them sterile. The males are then released into the environment to breed with the females, whose eggs are unfertilised and never hatch.
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