Professor’s simple, colorful invention could save lives

Thomas Kollars knows about dengue fever. His wife, Peggy, caught it when she was in Thailand, where he was working on mosquito control for the U.S. Army.

He watched her skin turn bright pink because her capillaries were leaking, he recalls, and she was racked with pains she said were worse than childbirth. The disease is sometimes called breakbone fever because the pain is so severe.

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SUZANNE OLIVER

Thomas Kollars, a professor at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, has invented the ProVector, a device resembling a plastic artificial flower. The hanging device attracts mosquitoes, which feed on a biopesticide that causes them to die. The invention is not harmful to humans.

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SUZANNE OLIVER

Close up of the invention, ProVector, by Dr. Tom Kollars of Georgia Southern University in Statesboro. ProVector is a plastic artificial flower that attracts mosquitos with its colors, then gives them a biopesticide. Credit

DEADLY ILLNESSES

• Dengue fever: There are an estimated 50 million cases of dengue fever a year. About 2.5 billion people are at risk, and the disease is epidemic in 100 countries. About 5 percent of dengue cases are fatal.
• Malaria: There are an estimated 250 million cases of malaria a year. The death toll is about 1 million per year.

Sources: World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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He saw dengue killing a boy of about 5 in a hospital in Thailand. “He was in a coma, and he wasn’t going to come out,” Kollars says. “His mother and his sister were just holding him, weeping. That still gets me.”

Now Kollars, a professor at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, has invented a device called the ProVector that will kill the mosquitoes that carry dengue, as well as malaria. It has the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives.

“I’m here for a reason,” Kollars says. “I’m here to make this a better place.”

When it’s manufactured and distributed throughout the tropical and subtropical regions of the Third World, the ProVector, which resembles a large, brightly colored plastic flower, will hang in people’s homes and public buildings.

Mosquitoes are lured by the colors, then feed on a nectar inside that contains a biopesticide that is safe for humans but deadly for the insects.

In trials conducted by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, the ProVector killed 50 percent to 100 percent of mosquitoes within days.

“This mechanism is beautiful because it’s so straightforward,” says Dr. Charles Senessie, president of the Afro-European Medical and Research Network. “It’s easy, accessible and affordable.”

Senessie’s organization is working with African countries such as Uganda to get ProVectors distributed, and Kollars is on a monthlong Third World tour promoting the invention and doing more research.

“Americans don’t have any idea of the impact mosquitoes have in other parts of the world,” Kollars says. “I worked in Bangladesh on a malaria mission. A Bangladeshi colonel grabbed me by the shoulders. He said, ‘Capt. Kollars, you have to help me. My guys are dying before I can get them out of the jungle.’ He had tears streaming down his face.

“That was malaria.”

Kollars was a captain in the U.S. Army (and is a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve), but for two years he has been working at Georgia Southern, where he’s director of the Biodefense and Infectious Disease Laboratory.

He has been working on the ProVector, on and off, for 10 years, spending more than $100,000 on prototypes he built in his garage, and finally has it close to launch.

“I’ve teamed with a company called Medical Infusion Technologies out of Savannah. They’re the business guys. I’m interested in research.”

So interested, in fact, that he continues to run tests on which color patterns are most attractive to which species of mosquitoes.

“There’s no way we’re going to kill all the mosquitoes” in an area,” he explains. “Some of these homes have 1,000 mosquitoes coming into them in one night.

“But there’s a threshold, and if you can get below that threshold you can stop the cycle” of mosquitoes biting infected people and carrying the disease to uninfected people.

Bed nets, which keep mosquitoes away from sleeping people in malaria-prone regions, have had some success and a great deal of publicity. Kollars says they are effective, but not completely so, and ProVector is a supplement.

The device will sell for $7 to $10, and grants and governments may cover most of that for families too poor to pay; refills of the biopesticide cost $1.