I came to Australia to study the deadliest animal in the world. Now, there may be some Australian audience members thinking, Struth, science has finally recognized the importance of the drop bears. 

But I'm not studying drop bears because around the world, by transmitting diseases like malaria and dengue fever, mosquitoes kill more than a million people every year, making them the deadliest animal on the planet.

Now, in Australia, the most common mosquito borne disease is Ross River virus and it occurs at high rates in some areas but not others. My question is why? What is it about certain areas that makes them breed disease? 

If we can understand the environmental factors that contribute to disease transmission, then we can alter the environment or target our control efforts to prevent human infections. But to answer that question, I had to find out where the infected mosquitoes were in South Australia.

And traditionally, testing mosquitoes for virus has always been difficult. So I used a new technique. It takes these cards, which are embedded with virus preserving chemicals, and coats them in honey. Mosquitoes will come to feed on the honey and in the process, spit virus onto the card where it can later be detected. Now, no one had ever used this technique in a broad scale virus survey before, so I had to adapt it.

I developed new traps and set them at over a hundred field sites across South Australia. And I captured over 20,000 hungry mosquitoes and let them feed on the card for a week before testing the cards for virus. Now you may not think that these traps look very impressive, but science doesn't have to be beautiful. It has to be effective. And these traps are proving to be our most sensitive method of detecting infected mosquitoes.

I found three types of infection: Ross River virus, Barmah forest virus and Stratford virus which has never before been found in South Australia. I now have the virus data I need to conduct my analysis and I'm collecting publicly available data about the environment surrounding my traps, like: the density of human housing; the biodiversity of mammals; and the ratio of green space to buildings, to see if any of those environmental factors can link these virus hotspots that I've shown here. But the most exciting part of my research so far has been the success of this method. Public health officials in Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia have been in contact with us about implementing this technique for their surveillance next year. And I developed these traps on a tight budget.

I used recycled milk cartons, pantyhose and paper clips to make the traps. Each trap costs less than a dollar and can be reused for the whole season. That was important to me because the majority of mosquito borne disease risk happens in economically impoverished countries. In India, for example, where about a quarter of the population lives on a dollar a day, there are thirty three million cases of dengue infection every year. With my low budget virus surveillance and spatial analysis method, I can help any country, regardless of resources, find out: where their deadliest animals occur; why they're there; and how we can stop them from infecting humans.