Students create ant-malaria soap

Your head is pounding, burning with raging fever, your aching bones feeling like they weigh a ton. Covered in profuse sweating, your exhausted body shivers with teeth-chattering chills.

For anyone who's suffered through severe bouts of malaria, this is the nauseating roller coaster the disease typically wreaks on its victims.

But now an award-winning innovation by two students in Burkina Faso could help reduce the devastating impact of the life-threatening disease, which is caused by parasites that are spread to humans through the bites of infected mosquitoes.

Moctar Dembele, who is from Burkina Faso, and Gerard Niyondiko, from Burundi, have used locally sourced herbs and natural ingredients to create a soap they say repels mosquitoes, in order to prevent malaria.

Dubbed "Fasoap," the innovation was awarded the $25,000 Grand Prize in the Global Social Venture Competition (GSVC), in April. Launched by Berkeley MBA students, the GSVC is a global competition designed to help budding entrepreneurs transform their ideas into businesses that will have a positive social impact.

Fasoap is made from shea butter, essential lemongrass oil and other ingredients that are still a secret.

"After using the soap, it leaves on the skin a scent that repels mosquitoes," says Niyondiko, who studies with Dembele at the International Institute for Water and Environmental Engineering in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso.

"In addition, waste water products contain substances that prevent the development of mosquito larvae, because the sanitation problem in Africa is one of the causes of mosquito vectors of malaria."

About half of the world's population is at risk of malaria, according to the World Health Organization. The disease's impact is mostly felt in the world's poorest countries; in 2010, there were an estimated 660,000 malaria deaths, 90% of which occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, mostly among children under five years old.


/CNN/