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July 2016
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On the evening of Tuesday June 21, 2016, the University received the shocking news of the untimely passing of Professor Dave Chadee, the recipient of the “Most Outstanding International Research Project” award at the recently held UWI-NGC Research Awards Ceremony for his work on the “Biology and behaviour of male mosquitoes in relation to new approaches to control disease transmitting mosquitoes.” Professor Chadee’s funeral was held on June 24 and the University community bid farewell to a man whose life work has been internationally recognised. We reprint under an excerpt from an article carried in the March 2009 issue of UWI TODAY that describes how he came to be the Mosquito Man. “Almost as invisibly as the mosquitoes he’s been studying for twenty years, Dr Dave Chadee has been doing pioneering research on the annoying, and in the case of Aedes aegypti, deadly insects that are a growing plague to modern society. Little is known locally of his work that has contributed significantly to refining methods to eradicate and control Aedes aegypti in particular, the source of four known serotypes of Dengue Fever (DF), and their potentially fatal complications: Dengue Haemmorhagic Fever (DHF) and Dengue Shock Syndrome (DSS), and Yellow Fever. Internationally, however, Dr Chadee’s work is so highly regarded that he was asked to collaborate with a team from Tulane University in New Orleans in developing a lethal ovitrap, a device designed to trap eggs and kill the laying mosquitoes, and for this work the team has received a grant of TT$1.5 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Entomology, the study of insects, is not a calling that comes to many. For Dave Chadee it was not so much a call as a scream. He remembers the fright and the awe with the clarity of someone who’s identified a defining moment in life. He’d been playing around a chenette tree, and with a four-year-old’s innocent impetuosity, he hugged the trunk. Unbeknownst to him, the tree was ringed with caterpillars and their spiny bristles stung the affectionate arms pressed against them. As he screamed and thrashed about wildly, his school principal father came running home, recognising his offspring’s wails in that discerning way of parents. By then the child was slashing away at the caterpillars with his chenette branch stick. His father soothed his wounds then took him back to the scene. He got a jar, filled it with it some leaves and placed the caterpillars carefully inside. Daily, they would inspect it and replace the leaves. One day, they seemed dead and he grew sad (they were pupating) but his father advised that they keep observing a little more. Finally, their vigilance was repaid. Butterflies! Beautiful mint green butterflies, the most gorgeous creatures he had ever beheld, and Chadee was hooked for life. He left their cocoa estate in Tableland and went off to Dalhousie University to do a BSc in Entomology, but was advised that if he wanted to do real research on mosquitoes he had to go to the tropics. So it was back to Trinidad. Although the Aedes aegypti had been deemed eradicated in the sixties, by the late 1970s they had returned. When he returned, and joined the Ministry of Health in 1979, it was the middle of a Yellow Fever outbreak. From a research perspective, he could not have timed it better. Since then, he’s done countless studies and collaborated with several others to examine possibly every aspect of this particular mosquito’s existence. Given the nature and intimacy of his work, it is tempting to say that Dr Chadee knows every mosquito by first-name – he could probably tell you which mosquitoes bit him when he got Dengue twice." |
