Wind Offers Clue to Curbing Malaria
Study: targeting larval pools downwind from malaria hotspots could help control disease
February 14, 2012
Malaria is transmitted among humans by female Anopheles mosquitoes like this one.
A new malaria prevention strategy might literally be blowing in the wind.
A team of scientists studying the patterns of malaria infection in rural Kenyan villages noticed that, despite a gradual reduction of malaria cases in the region, “hotspots” persisted.
The blood-sucking mosquitos that transmit the malaria parasite to humans breed in water.
So the researchers decided to examine the location of those breeding ponds in relation to the most infected villages. Their findings are published this week in Nature Communications.
Co-author David Smith, an epidemiologist with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, says a curious pattern emerged.
“In this study what we did is we looked at the locations of aquatic habitats and the locations of humans and we were trying to find out if there was some kind of clustering, which there should be and of course there was. But as we looked even closer what we found was that there was an association between the direction of the wind and the location of where people were at risk.”
Smith says while mosquitos aren’t particularly good flyers, their flight pattern is directed by the scent of a potential human host.
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