Spanish visionary Pilar Mateo is snuffing out bug-borne diseases and the poverty behind them.

When Pilar Mateo earned her Ph.D. in chemistry years ago, she planned to join her father’s paint company in her native Valencia, Spain. Her goals were admirable but not necessarily world-changing : develop better, more durable paints and live a charitable life helping others in her local community. It never dawned on her that house paint might be the key to something so life-altering as curbing diseases around the world, or that helping others might mean tackling something really big, like ending poverty.

A newspaper article about the closing of a local cockroach-infested hospital changed everything. A tinkerer by nature, Mateo set about devising a microencapsulation technology that would let her lace paint with slow-release insecticides that were safe for people but deadly to bugs. The process was eventually patented and is now approved for use in 15 countries. That was the beginning of Inesfly Corporation.

Reaching the world

In 1997, Mateo’s revolutionary pesticide-spray alternative caught the attention of an activist doctor visiting Valencia from Bolivia. People were dying in his rural village, he said, from the spread of a parasitic disease called Chagas (found mainly in Latin America but also in other parts of the world, including the U.S. ). Maybe Mateo’s paint could help fend off the blood-sucking vinchucas (aka, kissing bugs) that inhabit cracks in the walls of rural mud huts and bite people at night, typically on the face. Infection with the parasite carried by these beetle-like bugs can cause fatal heart and intestinal problems.