“From rabies post-exposure prophylactics to measles and malaria vaccines, drones are getting life-saving shots to kids in remote parts of Kisumu,” reports Gavi:
Few things interrupt the unflustered tranquillity of Tama, a village in the lush flatlands of the Muhoroni region of Kisumu County in western Kenya. Save for the rumble of a tractor chugging away in the distance, the sporadic chirping birds, or the harmonic ruffle of millions of sugarcane leaves in the breeze, this is a typically quiet place.
But since April, the villagers have been growing accustomed to the once-eccentric whine of a drone zipping across the sky on its way to drop life-saving cargo at Tama Health Centre. Josephine Opiny recalls her exhilaration when she and other mums first witnessed a drone delivering vaccines at the health facility. That day, Opiny had brought her infant Matthews, then six weeks old, for immunisation. “It was my first time to see a drone,” she told VaccinesWork during a visit to the health centre in July. “I couldn’t make out its mission until I learned from the nurses that the drone delivered the vaccines my son received a few moments later. It was an exciting spectacle, and startling too.”
That day, baby Matthews got doses of pentavalent, pneumococcal, rotavirus, and oral polio vaccines – several of which had been recently airborne. The region’s infrastructure and the distance between health facilities and vaccine depots make the drone the fastest, safest, and most viable option for last-mile delivery. Before the commencement of Zipline’s drone deliveries to Tama, nurses here needed to undertake a two-hour return trip by motorbike to fetch the vaccines, the larger part of the journey navigating bumpy murram roads littered with jagged rocks. The going was necessarily slow. The nurses often found long waits at the sub-county headquarters, which added to lost time.
Drones are also providing vaccines to immunize hundreds of thousands of children in the west African nation of Ghana, protecting them against potentially lethal diseases.
Millions of people in other parts of Africa are receiving a life-saving malaria vaccine.
Zimbabwe is eradicating a disease that is the leading infections cause of blindness.
Kenyan farmers are using artificial intelligence to produce more food. Zambia used artificial intelligence to find more mineral wealth.
Drones with artificial intelligence are making life easier for some farmers in the United States. Robots with artificial intelligence are spreading on Japanese farms. In the U.S., farming robots now use artificial intelligence to kill 100,000 weeds per hour.
Scientists have developed tiny robots made of human cells to repair damaged cells. Nanorobots are also being used to fight cancer by cutting off the blood supply of tumors.
