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34 unmanned systems inside April/May 2016 AIR SOLUTIONS With a drone, the drop sites can be preprogrammed to be evenly spaced, he said. Embention's fully autonomous platform is heading to Ethiopia for more testing. Any mosquito-borne illness could theoretically be reduced by the intro- duction of sterile mosquitoes so if either of these delivery mechanisms can be commer- cialized, they could certainly be used to treat more than one disease. Just last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency said it would ship a mosquito irradiator to Brazil in the hopes of preventing zika in advance of the 2016 Olympic Games. It's possible these sterile mosquitoes would be released from drones—but more likely the government will use the older, more expensive method of manual distribution. Photo courtesy of Embention Catching Mosquitoes While mosquitoes are vectors of disease, not every mosquito can carry every disease—and not every mosquito is a carrier. Project Premonition, an experiment that has received support from Microsoft Research, aims to learn more about where disease- carrying mosquitoes are traveling, to track known epidemics and predict new outbreaks. Announced last year, the project in- cludes a custom-built mosquito trap, moved from place to place by drone, which would capture mosquitoes and sample their blood for diseases. By know- ing what diseases were found in an area, and how they were spreading, public health researchers would be able to better prepare people for their impact. Douglas Norris, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who is involved with the project, said manu- ally trapping mosquitoes is labor intensive and this new system could save researchers hours of work. Norris said he hopes to have a new version of the custom trap to experiment with this spring. "We're trying to accelerate our timeline to be more responsive to things like dengue and zika," he said. Tracking Monkeys It may seem counterintuitive to study ma- caque monkeys if the goal is to combat mos- quito-borne illnesses, but that's exactly what a team of researchers is doing in Malaysia, us- ing off-the-shelf UAS to map changing areas. That's because the macaques are carriers of a special kind of malaria that can be transmit- ted from monkeys to humans through mosqui- toes. (Normally, humans only get human ma- laria and monkeys only get monkey malaria.) In Malaysia, it's thought that this Plas- modium knowlesi malaria strain, which is steadily on the rise, was transferred to hu- The Embention team's tsetse fl y prototype drone. BY THE NUMBERS 2.5 billion people in more than 100 countries The number of people at risk of contracting dengue fever annually Source: World Health Organization