French specialists mentor Cuban scientist’s dissertation on insect control

 HAVANA, Cuba, Jul 14 (ACN) Jorge Estrada Hernandez, a professor at the School of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Havana, will present his doctoral thesis on a mosquito sterilization technique to control arboviral disease.

His tutors are the French specialists L. Almeida and N. Vauchelet, from the Sorbonne Université and the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, respectively, and J. Estrada Sarlabous, from Cuba’s Institute of Cybernetics, Mathematics and Physics (ICIMAF).

The supervising panel will be made up of prestigious scientists from ICIMAF, the University of Havana, the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (Brazil), and the National Polytechnic University of Asuncion, Paraguay, who described the subject as highly topical in light of the lack of effective vaccines against mosquito-borne viral diseases such as dengue, West Nile virus, chikungunya and Zika, especially in Latin America, Africa, the Asian subcontinent, Australia, and more recently Southern Europe.

The Incompatible and Sterile Insect Technique (IIT-SIT) is a successful method to control vector-borne infections applied since the 1950s and based on the sterilization of mosquito populations to tackle the outbreak of diseases and epidemics.