Mosquito News and Research

RSS

Researchers identify how mosquito's immune system attacks specific infections

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have determined a new mechanism by which the mosquitoes' immune system can respond with specificity to infections with various pathogens, including the parasite that causes malaria in humans, using one single gene.

20 Oct 2012

Researchers use cell phone data to track malaria spread in Kenya

"Harvard researchers found they could track the spread of malaria in Kenya using phone calls and text messages from 15 million mobile phones," ABC News' "Medical Unit" reports.

16 Oct 2012

International cooperation essential to help Uganda fight malaria

Uganda "has overcome a violent past, but hope is daily threatened by a force more deadly than any warlord or civil unrest": the mosquito, Ugandan Health Minister Christine Ondoa writes in a GlobalPost opinion piece. According to the WHO, "Uganda has the highest incidence of malaria in the world," and the disease is endemic in more than 95 percent of the country, she notes.

15 Oct 2012

Financial Times features special report on NTDs

The Financial Times has published a special report on neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) featuring 10 articles examining issues including prevention, research, and treatment.

12 Oct 2012

Perplexing evolutionary history of malaria transmitting mosquito species

An African mosquito species with a deadly capacity to transmit malaria has a perplexing evolutionary history, according to discovery by researchers at the Fralin Life Science Institute at Virginia Tech.

6 Oct 2012

Combination pill to treat malaria pre-approved by WHO

"A malaria drug made by India's Cipla has been pre-qualified by the World Health Organization (WHO), an important step towards its roll-out across Asia, where millions of people are infected with the mosquito-borne disease every year," Reuters reports.

6 Oct 2012

IRIN examines allegations of Global Fund grant misuse in Uganda

IRIN reports on allegations that a grant from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to Uganda was misused. "Evidence of the mismanagement of a $51 million malaria grant to Uganda from the Global Fund resulted in the July arrest of three Ministry of Health employees and prompted a police investigation into the matter," the news service writes.

3 Oct 2012

Washington Post examines Haiti's efforts to fight lymphatic filariasis

The Washington Post reports on Haiti's efforts to fight lymphatic filariasis, a parasitic mosquito-borne disease that can cause elephantiasis and is present in 80 percent of the country.

2 Oct 2012

Kenyan government releases new guidelines for treatment, prevention of visceral leishmaniasis

"The Kenyan government has launched guidelines for the treatment and prevention of visceral leishmaniasis, also known as kala azar or black fever, in a move government officials say is meant to contain the parasitic disease, which is endemic in the northern region of the country," IRIN reports.

29 Sep 2012

New malaria-transmitting mosquitoes: an interview with Jennifer Stevenson, Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

In the area in which we carried out the study, which was in the western Kenyan highlands, the main mosquitoes that have been confirmed to transmit malaria are the females of Anopheles gambiae sensu stricto, Anopheles arabiensis and Anopheles funestus.

28 Sep 2012

Newly discovered Eilat virus harmless and potentially valuable

A mosquito sample collected three decades ago in Israel's Negev Desert has yielded an unexpected discovery: a previously unknown virus that's closely related to some of the world's most dangerous mosquito-borne pathogens but, curiously, incapable of infecting non-insect hosts.

24 Sep 2012

U.S. foreign aid critical to achieving health goals, improving lives, strengthening international relationships

"Day after day, American foreign aid is dramatically improving millions of lives and consequently, impressions of America," former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean and Ray Chambers, chair of the MDG Health Alliance and the U.N. Secretary-General's Special Envoy for Malaria, write in the Huffington Post's "Global Motherhood" blog.

21 Sep 2012

Mosquitoes show signs of behavior change in response to bed net use, study says

About three years after two villages in Benin began using insecticide-treated bed nets to help prevent malaria, mosquitoes in the area changed their biting habits, so their "hours of 'peak aggression' [went] from 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. to around 5 a.m." and "in one village, the proportion of mosquito bites inflicted outdoors rose," according to a study published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, Reuters reports.

21 Sep 2012

Bed nets and insecticides could fail to protect people from new malaria-transmitting mosquitoes

A potentially dangerous new malaria-transmitting mosquito has been discovered in Kenya by scientists from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. This species, which has never been implicated in the transmission of malaria before, poses a threat because it bites humans at times when they are not protected by current malaria control techniques.

17 Sep 2012

Global child mortality rates fall 41% since 1990, U.N. reports

"Child mortality worldwide has fallen 41 percent since 1990, the result of myriad improvements in nutrition, access to vaccines and antibiotics, cleaner deliveries, better care of infants immediately after birth, and the use of insecticide-treated mosquito nets," according to "the findings of a report released Wednesday by three United Nations agencies and the World Bank," the Washington Post reports.

14 Sep 2012

Nano ‘velcro’ strip effective detector of water-borne contaminants

Researchers have developed a specialized glass strip covered in “hairy” nanoparticles that can detect pollution of water by toxic metals, such as mercury.

12 Sep 2012

Leading dengue fever vaccine candidate 30% effective in first large clinical trial

"The leading candidate to become the world's first vaccine against dengue fever was only 30 percent effective in its first large clinical trial, dealing at least a temporary setback to efforts to control a disease that threatens half the world's population," the New York Times reports.

12 Sep 2012