Bloomberg Philanthropies Funded Studies Make Progress In Fight Against Malaria
Two new strategies show promise in battling malaria, a disease that kills more than 400,000 people each year, mostly children ages five and under in sub-Saharan Africa.Both new strategies involve making Anopheles mosquitoes more resistant to malaria parasites, which live in the insects and infect humans when female mosquitoes feed on human blood.
Building mosquito resistance to the parasite would reduce the need for repeated, continuous use of other malaria control measures, such as insecticides and bed nets.One team of researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Malaria Research Institute discovered a strain of bacteria that can spread rapidly and persist long-term among malaria-carrying mosquitoes. They genetically modified the bacterial strain in a way that strongly suppresses development of malaria parasites, making mosquitoes much less likely to transmit parasites to humans...