Are smartphones a blessing or a curse? When you are in a restaurant and observe four people around a table not speaking to one another, their eyes glued to the little screens, you think the phones are a curse, destructive of true social life and real human contact. Indeed, schools around the world are trying to reduce their distracting effects by prohibiting their use during the school day.
But that is not the whole story, of course, and in this week's Journal one can read of an ingenious, unexpected and unequivocally beneficial use of smartphones. Specifically, they are proving to be a highly useful and efficient tool in the campaign to eradicate river blindness in Africa. First, a little background is needed.
Onchocerciasis, or river blindness, is caused by a parasitic worm that goes by the charming name of Onchocerca volvulus. It is spread by the bite of little black flies, one of which goes by the equally grandiloquent name of Simulium damnosum. The flies breed in fast-flowing water.
A fertilized adult female Onchocerca worm, which lives up to fifteen years in its human host, produces tiny offspring, a thousand a day, called microfilariae. These pass into the Simulium fly when it—or rather she (the male of the species being vegetarian)—bites a person infected with the parasite. The microfilariae undergo development in the fly and eventually find their way into its saliva, by which they are transmitted back to a human host, where they migrate from the bloodstream to the skin tissue, where they mature into adult worms, and the whole process starts again. In a way, it is an admirable contrivance, though one wishes it could all have been to a better purpose.
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