Development of a Field Portable Mosquito Monitoring System with Attractant

To increase the ratio of combat to support personnel and to preserve the health of combat personnel. Accurate surveillance of disease carrying mosquitoes provides risk assessment for some of the most important military infectious diseases including malaria, leishmaniasis, dengue, and West Nile virus. Current methods only approximately measure the risk, unless dangerous human-bait collections are performed. Better methods would reduce the number of vector control personnel required because their efforts could be targeted to the most problematic locations. Improved vector control would reduce the number of cases of disease among combat personnel. Development of a field portable mosquito monitoring system to identify the true disease risk (from disease vectors) in an operational environment is therefore a high priority for the Department of Defense; a portable device ready to use anywhere that electronically scores the number of disease carrying insects. We envisage a field portable, durable, light, remote mosquito monitoring system that incorporates observational software with more robust algorithms to handle lower contrast settings with higher background noise levels, into a small "data logger" type device used in conjunction with a miniature camera(s)/ imagery device to accurately record both visual and time duration data of mosquitoes landing on an artificial attractant surface. This system would be used in combination with an attractant-monitoring surface.