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Most of my posts on this blog are about nuclear power, nuclear waste and nuclear weapons. I occasionally post about nuclear medicine and industrial uses of nuclear materials. Today, I am going to post about the use of nuclear materials for pest eradication.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the tsetse fly’s toxic bite kills as many as three million cattle each year from trypanosomiasis. Fortunately, veterinarians in Senegal have collaborated with researchers in Austria on a project funded by the United States to deal with this problem. Senagal is a former French colony on the Atlantic coast of Africa. Now farmers in the western Niayes zone of Senegal say that scientists have eradicated ninety nine percent of the tsetse flies by sterilizing the males with gamma rays. This technique is known as nuclear insect sterilization.
The first step in the eradication program is to hatch thousands of tsetse files in an artificial habitat about nine hundred miles away in the West African nation of Burkina Faso. Then the flies are sent to the laboratory in Seibersdorf, Austria where they are placed in tiny ionization chambers. They are blasted with gamma rays which renders them sterile. The sterile files are then chilled which puts them to sleep and placed in biodegradable paper boxes. Finally, they are shipped to and released in Senegal.
This technique was developed in Africa two decades ago on the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar. Tsetse flies were not only destroying cattle but they were also infecting humans with sleeping sickness which can be fatal. It proved difficult to stop the plague of flies with pesticides. Flies which survived pesticides quickly bred to produce flies that were resistant to the chemical. The U.N. and the IAEA experimented with using gamma rays to sterilize male flies. This resulted in the disappearance of the flies from Zanzibar within a couple of years.
News of the eradication program spread to Senegal where the government had been very vocal in dealing with their tsetse fly problem. Senegal’s Ministry of Livestock and Animal Production worked with the nation’s veterinarians and sought help from the IAEA in 2005. Other West African nations are also pursuing similar eradication programs.
The U.S. has spent around five million dollars on this project which has reduced the number of trypanosomiasis cases to almost zero. This project is one of a number of projects designed to harness nuclear materials and process for useful purposes. This program has continued even though the Trump administration has severely cut some foreign aid programs.
As a result of this intervention, the income of farmers in Niayes is expected to rise by at least thirty percent because more cows will survive. This will allow farmers there to buy more European dairy cows which can produce as much as twenty times the amount of milk as the native breeds of cattle.
This reversal of commercial fortunes is based on a global collaboration of agriculture and nuclear technology. Since 2010, the U.S. has sent almost three hundred and eighty million dollars to the International Atomic Energy Agency to assist in the eradication of the tsetse fly plague in Senegal. The U.S. has set aside an additional five hundred and sixty million dollars this month to help keep the IAEA laboratory in Seibersdorf, Austria in operation.
It is not clear whether the U.S. investment in this program will result in any financial gain for the U.S. or U.S. companies. Jeffery Eberhardt has been nominated to serve as President Trump’s special representative for nuclear nonproliferation. He said in May that the U.S. participates in this program to “expand the benefits of peaceful nuclear uses” and expressed “a firm commitment to continuing this legacy.”