Mercedes Pascual is a scientist at the University of Michigan. She and her team studied areas in northern India where irrigation systems were built over a number of years. They compared how malaria progressed with the spread of irrigation.
“What happens is that then when you irrigate, there is more, in a sense, more breeding habitats for the mosquito.”
She and the other scientists found that after farmers began irrigating their crops, the risk of malaria rose sharply. At first her team thought maybe the number of cases rose because there was little effort to control the mosquitoes that spread the disease. But they were wrong.
“In fact, we saw the opposite, that this transition stage was characterized not just by heightened malaria risk, but also by more intervention to control the mosquito vector.”
Even after the mosquito control efforts were in place, the researchers found high rates of malaria continued for 10 years or longer.
Mercedes Pascual suggests that the irrigation project supervisors need to work more on reducing places where mosquitoes might reproduce. She also says health officials may need to try other methods of malaria prevention that would work for long periods of time.
A report on the study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
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2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
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2013-11-25