SCIENTISTS have recorded a major breakthrough in the global efforts to eradicate malaria with the breeding of mosquitoes that are unable to infect people with the malaria parasite.
According to University of California Irvine (UCI), United States (U.S.) scientists, one advantage of the development is that it can be applied to the dozens of different mosquito types that harbor and transmit the Plasmodium falciparum parasite, including those in Africa.
The study was published yesterday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
National Coordinator NMCP, Dr. Chioma Amajoh, told The Guardian that the breakthrough in creating mosquitoes incapable of transmitting malaria was a welcome development.
Amajoh said U.S. researchers had made efforts in the past to develop genetically modified mosquitoes that cannot transmit malaria.
Anthony James and his colleagues from UCI and the Pasteur Institute in Paris have produced a model of the Anopheles stephensi mosquito- a major source of malaria in India and the Middle East — that impairs the development of the malaria parasite. These mosquitoes, inturn, cannot transmit the disease through their bites. Culled from TheGuardian Newspaper
This is good news for those of us in Nigeria, especially pregnant women and children. According to studies, Malaria is one of the causes of deaths among women and young children. Getting rid of mosquitoes is a sure way of reducing maternal and child mortality in Nigeria.
Then what will happen to the ones that cause malaria?, I can’t imagine…..maybe they will gradually be out of fashion. Heeeeeheeeee.
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