Page 41 - Bloomberg Businessweek-October 29, 2018

◼ SOLUTIONS Bloomberg Businessweek October 29, 2018

is being undertaken by the Puerto Rico Vector Control technical adviser to the project, in an email.
Unit, is also studying insecticide resistance, applying lar- From January to September, field workers collected
vicides to breeding sites, and educating residents. The more than 300,000 A. aegypti females. “We confirmed
PRVCU stores all data on remote Microsoft Azure serv- we have a huge problem of Aedes on the island, and we
ers and relies on the cloud to share information quickly need to do more to control it,” says Nicole Nazario, the
between research teams in the field and the laboratory. PRVCU’s laboratory manager. The insect has become
Each of the PRVCU’s 24 field workers collects mos- resistant to traditional insecticides, and new ways of
quitoes from the traps and uses an iPhone app to pin- controlling it are necessary, she says.
point their locations. This gives their supervisor, José While “very low numbers of Zika, dengue, and chikun-
Sánchez, the ability to see where they are at all times gunya cases have been identified” since the island regained
and how many traps they’ve checked. If there’s an unusu- normal testing capacity around January, mosquito- borne
ally high number of A. aegypti in a specific location, diseases still pose a major threat, according to Harris. “I
software can automatically assign some of Sánchez’s know mosquito-borne illnesses are being underreported in
workers to go there to identify breeding sites and collect Puerto Rico,” says Arturo Leis, a neurologist and senior sci-
samples. Mapping software pulls data from the cloud to entist at Methodist Rehabilitation Center in Jackson, Miss.
determine which traps have attracted the most female Leis has traveled to the island frequently since Hurricane
A. aegypti and to identify the homes where larvicides Maria to evaluate children with microcephaly and Zika fetal
have been applied. Cloud technology also allows soft- syndrome and establish a partnership with clinicians in the
ware to automatically complete time-consuming tasks University of Puerto Rico’s pediatrics department.
“What the PRVCU is doing could be a game winner, but
we actually have to do more,” says Leis, to help clinicians
diagnose and treat victims of mosquito-borne diseases.
The PRVCU is using special algorithms to speed up the
mind-numbing process of counting mosquito eggs, which
are no bigger than grains of salt. The algorithms are being
46 developed for the PRVCU by Wovenware, a Puerto Rican
company that makes predictive analytics software. Rather
than manually count the eggs that Sánchez’s field workers
collect, lab technicians upload photos of them to a pro-
gram running in the cloud. The photos are then analyzed
by Wovenware software, which provides a count, giving lab
workers more time to process samples, research insecti-
cide resistance, and expand surveillance areas.
Five of Wovenware’s roughly 80 employees are work-
ing on the PRVCU project on a part-time, pro bono basis.
overnight using the data that the workers gathered They’re building on models that the 15-year-old company
during the day, then use the findings to figure out which developed to detect objects in satellite images for cli-
traps and homes to check the following day. ents such as U.S. Department of Defense.
Instead of waiting for someone to get infected and The software they are working on will eventually
then marking the location, as Puerto Rico’s Department assess whether an egg has hatched and also count
of Health has done for years, “we’re being proactive,” and identify adults by species and sex, says Carlos
mapping where the mosquitoes are so we can reduce Meléndez, co-founder and chief operating officer of
their numbers, says César Piovanetti, who oversees the Wovenware. Speeding up the workflow in this way will
PRVCU’s information technology architecture. “It wouldn’t be useful to others dealing with mosquito- borne dis-
be possible to do this project without the cloud,” he says. eases around the world. “The nature of being an island
“We need to process a huge amount of data and make it in the Caribbean is that we’re going to have mosquitoes,”
available to workers quickly.” says the PRVCU’s Piovanetti. “Our goal is to understand
The nonprofit Puerto Rico Science, Technology, & why they breed so well in some places and what we can
Research Trust established the PRVCU in 2016 in Río do as a society to drastically reduce their populations.”
Piedras. It expects to receive $65 million from the Centers �Nick Leiber
for Disease Control and Prevention over five years for the
project, which has about 100 employees. The PRVCU “can ILLUSTRATIONS BY LIA KANTROWITZ
be agile in its operations in ways that often government THE BOTTOM LINE An initiative to track a dangerous species of mosquito
across Puerto Rico is developing procedures and technology that someday
organizations cannot be,” said Angi Harris, the CDC’s could help other parts of the world.