What’s the most dangerous animal on earth? Sharks? Lions? Bears? You’d be surprised. The most dangerous animal is the mosquito! Mosquitoes are carriers of some of the most dangerous and fatal diseases including Malaria, Dengue Fever, and Yellow Fever and are responsible for about 725,000 deaths every year.

In Sri Langka, the advertising company Leo Burnett, together with the newspaper Mawbina took fighting dengue a step further. For national dengue week they ran the usual articles on how to avoid getting bitten by dengue-carrying mosquitoes, but they printed the paper with inks laced with citronella essence – a natural mosquito repellant.

Mosquitoes are most active in the early morning and evening, and this happens to be when people most frequently have time to read newspapers. Imagine reading the paper, and have the mosquitoes automatically avoid you.

The readers of the paper had an incentive to carry it with them or even hang it social hubs to take advantage of its effects. This in turn led to more exposure for the articles and the ads that the paper’s advertisers ran, making it a great win-win for all involved.

This was just a one week campaign that reached its peak during World Health Day, but we hope that this brilliant solution will become permanent. Dengue has no vaccine. There are at least 50 million cases globally every year and the mosquito species that carry the disease tend to flourish in urban environments. The natural citronella essence has less chances of creating resistant strains unlike artificial chemicals.

Visionaries + Movers Leo Burnett + Mawbina

Photos via: Mawbina