In Zanzibar, drones equipped with AI are helping hunt down the last malaria hotspots. The disease’s prevalence here has fallen from a historical 40% to 0.04%, so mass measures are gradually giving way to targeted searches for places where mosquitoes continue to breed.
Earlier, surveying such sites could take up to three days and required large teams. Now the system is intended to become much faster and more accurate.
The process is straightforward: the area is mapped, AI identifies suspicious water bodies and sets priorities, and then the drone flies to the needed location and sprays larvicide — a substance that kills mosquito larvae in water.
The experiment looks very promising: at the final stage of malaria control, precision rather than scale may become decisive.
