7,000 Colombians are using a phone app to help poor neighborhoods target mosquito breeding grounds to prevent the spread of the deathly mosquito-borne Zika virus in their country.
According to the World Health Organization, 2 million people have caught the virus to date this year, causing more than 720 deaths.
The app, created by U.S.-based data and analytics company Premise, is used to record, georeference and photograph information to pass on to city health authorities.
The paid participants have inspected around 108,000 homes in the Colombian cities of Cucuta, Cali and Santa Marta, and helped residents identify any unwanted water, mud-puddles or trash, in homes, streets and parks, that may breed mosquitoes.
“When we went back to the homes we visited after two months, they didn’t have breeding grounds, people were applying chlorine to destroy them,” said one of the participants, Glenis Barragan, to the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “We’re raising awareness among people that solving and avoiding the problem is in our very own hands.”
The initiative has destroyed around 70,000 mosquito breeding sites to date and Premise hopes the project will be expanded to other cities in the nation, as well as across South America.
