Groundbreaking research into the behavior of biting flies offers promising insights for Africa’s battle against sleeping sickness.
Scientists have discovered that biting flies are drawn to the color blue, mistaking it for the hue of the animals they typically prey upon.
The department of life sciences at Aberystwyth University in the United Kingdom spearheaded an entomological field study to investigate the specific attraction of these flies to the color blue.
As a result, traps worldwide are now being manufactured in this particular color to enhance their efficacy.
This newfound understanding of the flies’ color preference could prove invaluable in the fight against sleeping sickness in Africa, potentially leading to more effective trapping and control methods to combat these disease-carrying insects.
By developing artificial neural networks that mimic the visual processing in the brain of biting flies, researchers came to the conclusion they published.
Flies caught in blue traps were more likely to not have eaten .recently, suggesting they had been on the lookout for hosts.
The research, which has also been peer-reviewed and published in the Proceedings of Royal Society B journal, also cast doubt on a previous theory that blue objects represented shade to the flies.
The new findings may mark a turning point in the fight against diseases endemic in sub-Saharan Africa that remain without treatment and are generally fatal.
The team’s conclusions could be key in combating diseases like human African trypanosomiasis – also known as sleeping sickness – and controlling stable flies, which primarily attack cattle and horses.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 98 percent of reported cases are caused by the parasite Trypanosoma brucei gambiense, which is found in 24 countries in Western and Central Africa.
The second form, Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense, accounts for less than 2 percent of cases and is found in 13 countries in Eastern and Southern Africa.