My group is working on a new approach for vector control, it's not a traditionnal approach, it involves an intracellular bacterial agent called Wolbachia. Wolbachia is very common in the environment, it occurs in up to 60% of all insect species, but very importantly it doesn't occur in the mosquito that transmits dengue, or Zika viruses or chikungunya for that matter, to people. So what we have learnt of the last ten years or so, is that if we introduce Wolbachia into mosquito populations it reduces their ability to transmit these pathogens to people. So the idea is very simple, we have generated strains of Aedes aegypti in the laboratory that countain Wolbachia, we're wanting to grow up those strains and release small numbers into the environment where they'll mate with the wild mosquitoes, the Wolbachia gets passed into those mosquito populations and we see a reduction in disease. So currently, we're undertaking field trials in five countries in the Americas and also in southeast Asia and Australia, so we have active releases and programs on the way now in Australia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Colombia and Brazil. And we're seeing success in all of those locations currently. The results we have are very promising and we're in a process where we're hoping to be able to scale up this deployment into some large population centers over the next couple of years, and during those deployments we're hoping to be able to obtain definitive evidence on the amount of disease reduction in human population as well as to be able to drive the cost of the deployment down. Our target is to be able to reach less than one US dollar per person for the deployment, and we operate in a non-for-profit research consortium. I think there is actually no evidence to suggest at the moment that there is any mosquito other than Aedes aegypti transmitting Zika, there have been some observations where people have found Zika in mosquitoes but no one has done any definitive work to show that actually those mosquitoes transmit. The group of flaviviruses that Zika belongs to are nearly all transmitted by Aedes aegypti, so the conventional wisdom is that at the current time we believe that Aedes aegypti is the principal vector. Possibly Aedes albopictus is a secondary vector but we know for dengue that Aedes albopictus is not a very good vector for a number of reasons and so we would expect the same to be the case for Zika. And so the current thinking in the way I think we should be proceeding until we have scientific evidence otherwise, is that Aedes aegypti is the primary vector that needs to be targeted. From the perspective of pesticide use generally, I support pesticide use because if it's used properly it can have a very big impact. The problem with pesticides is that they're often not used appropriately, and they cost a lot of money, and so the problem you see in developing countries is where governments want to fog insecticide because it's very visible publicly, but we know from studies that those types of applications don't actually reduce the Aedes aegypti population. However, doing interior residual spraying we know works well and the data we have in Australia shows that it is a very good way to control dengue outbreaks and I think it should be a good way to control Zika outbreaks. The big problem though is that it just cost too much money and then it's difficult to have a high quality deployment of pesticides. You might think that I'll be concerned about pesticides because I'm developing an alternative control measure that doesn't rely on pesticides, but actually I think we need many tools to work collaboratively in order to have impact on Zika and dengue, and I think pesticides will continue to be one of the major tools we'll use for the future. So I think the potential for the method we're developing to make an impact is very large, the mathematical modelling that's been done independently of our group suggest a very large impact on both dengue, chikungunya and also Zika virus transmission, I think the issue we have is about the timelines being able to do scale up so that the technology can be made available to many people in many countries and that, logistically is going to take time. But the data that we're seeing is that we're likely to have a very big impact. So we have run a mass control trial that has just started now to directly measure the impact of our intervention, but we know from the observational data that's been accumulated over the last five years in our early deployments, that in all of the places in five countries now where we've deployed Wolbachia into the local mosquito population there has been no dengue transmission occuring in those areas once Wolbachia has established and so it looks like the effect size is going to be quite large for this intervention so we're quite optimistic about the impact that it will have. So our first trials were done in Australia where we were able to go into small communities and undertake ten weeks of mosquito releases, and in each of those weeks of release, we released mosquitoes at around the rate of five adult females per person, per week in the community, and we did that for ten weeks, so a very small number of mosquitoes were released, and then within three months the Wolbachia infections were close to 90% in the wild mosquito population and they've sustained themselves above 90% now for five years without us needing to do anything, so the intervention is sustainable and front-loaded from a cost point of view. So from a public health perspective that makes it an ideal intervention. Costs are up-front and it sustains itself without needing to be reapplied like most other interventions. You can almost think about it, although I don't really like to use this analogy, as a vaccine for the landscape, that we're vaccinating the landscape against this Aedes transmitted viruses. One of the questions that we've been addressing right from the beginning of our work is about the safety of the intervention, it's been subject in numerous risk analyses, it's been made publicly available for people to scrutinize all of the risk analyses that's been done has shown a negligible risk of any untoward consequences for either the environment or human health. And so we think that it is quite safe and that's the opinion of a number of independent groups that have looked at it and regulated it in the five countries that we work in. And I think, if you think about it you should be able to see intuitively why that's the case. So, it's estimated that there may be eight million species of different insects on the planet, and of those eight millions may be 40 to 60% of them naturally have Wolbachia infections and so we've added Wolbachia infections to one of those eight millions species, and we've done it in an area, all areas actually, that naturally contain Wolbachia infections. So, the change or the perturbation to the environment that we've made is very very small.