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Fred Soper and the Global Malaria Eradication Programme

Journal of Public Health Policy, 2002 by Gladwell, Malcolm

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One of Soper's greatest early victories came in Brazil, in the late nineteen-thirties, when he took on a particularly vicious strain of mosquito known as Anopheles gambiae. There are about twenty-five hundred species of mosquito in the world, each with its own habits and idiosyncrasies-some like running water, some like standing water, some bite around the ankles, some bite on the arms, some bite indoors, some bite outdoors-but only mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles are capable of carrying the human malaria parasite.

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And, of the sixty species of Anopheles that can transmit malaria, gambiae is the variety best adapted to spreading the disease. In California, there is a strain of Anopheles known as freeborni, which is capable of delivering a larger dose of malaria parasite than gambiae ever could. But freeborni is not a good malaria vector, because it prefers animals to people. Gambiae, by contrast, bites humans ninety-five per cent of the time. It has long legs and yellow-and-black spotted wings. It likes to breed in muddy pools of water, even in a water-filled footprint. And, unlike many mosquitoes, it is long-lived, meaning that once it has picked up the malaria parasite it can spread the protozoan to many others. Gambiae gathers in neighborhoods in the evenings, slips into houses at dusk, bites quietly and efficiently during the night, digests its "blood meal" while resting on the walls of the house, and then slips away in the morning. In epidemiology, there is a concept known as the "basic reproduction number," or BRN, which refers to the number of people one person can infect with a contagious disease. The number for H.I.V., which is relatively difficult to transmit, is just above one. For measles, the BRN is between twelve and fourteen. But with a vector like gambiae in the picture the BRN for malaria can be more than a hundred, meaning that just one malarious person can be solely responsible for making a hundred additional people sick. The short answer to the question of why malaria is such an overwhelming problem in Africa is that gambiae is an African mosquito.

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Fred Soper and the Global Malaria Eradication Programme

Journal of Public Health Policy, 2002 by Gladwell, Malcolm

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